After lunch the Arabian coast also was to be seen. The contrast between the coasts is memorable. It was a warm, grey day, and Arabia showed more delicate than we had yet seen it. The immense mountains were almost beyond sight. All the foreground was opalescent sand shot with tiny cones and ridges of rock, themselves streaked with colour as though sprinkled with the same sand. The effect of opalescence must be purely atmospheric--but it is very beautiful. But the African coast is rugged to the water's edge. The mountains tower out of the sea; and the grey day, which drew out the iridescence of Arabia, only blackened deeper the gigantic mountains of Africa. The one is delicate pearl and amber, the other is ebony. Well justified by sight and feeling were the judgments of books upon the perfumes and delicate-bred steeds and philosophy of Arabia as over against the grimness of "Darkest Africa." All gazing was distracted by a death on board at sunset. The body was buried under the moon at eight o'clock. Every soldier stands to attention; the engines are stopped; in the sudden silence the solemn service is read; the body is slid from the plank; the massed buglers sound the Last Post.... The engines begin again to throb and grind, and the routine, broken rudely but momentarily, resumes. Next morning we wakened in the harbour of Suez. We lay here a day. There appeared to have been some guerilla sniping from the banks of the Canal. The troop-ship bridges were barricaded with sandbags, and all ranks warned against exposing themselves unnecessarily. A shot in the back out of the desert would be a more or less ignominious beginning, and, as an ending, unutterable! At ten in the morning we started into the Canal. Much valuable Egyptian shore was missed by our being obliged to cross to starboard and salute a French cruiser lying in the mouth. But before we had well passed her the Arabian bank became thick with Ghurkas. War--or the rumour of war--was brought home to our bosoms by their deep and elaborate entrenchments, barbed-wire entanglements, and outworks. The Ghurkas justify, seen in the flesh, all that has been said of their physique: short, deep-chested fellows, with a grin that suggests war is their sport indeed. On the Egyptian side the Suez suburbs stretched away in a thin strip of fertile country bearing crops and palm-groves and following the rail to Cairo--easily visible, running neck-and-neck with a half-dozen telegraph-lines. Later on, the line draws still nearer to the Canal, making a halt at each of the Canal stations. The stations, with their neat courtyards and neat French offices, and the neat and handsome red-roofed villa, break the monotony of sand-ridge. And the monotony of ejaculation from the deck is broken by a robust French voice shouting a greeting through the megaphone from the station pontoon.