Bring your steamer chair to the rail and look out from the deck of our ship over the Red Sea as we sail southward along the coast of East Africa. The sun is hot but we have an awning above us, and the salt breeze cools our cheeks. We have returned by rail and by river from Khartum to Cairo, have gone over the Nile delta to Port Said, have passed through the Suez Canal, and have sailed south into the Red Sea. We are now off the coast of Arabia, on our way into the Indian Ocean, bound for the port of Mombasa, whence we shall go across a mighty plateau to the great African lakes. Mombasa is within a rifle shot of the Equator and only a few miles north of Zanzibar. It is at the southeastern end of Kenya Colony and is the terminus of the Uganda Railway which crosses that country to Kisumu, the chief port of Lake Victoria. My original intention was to have reached Lake Victoria by taking the mail steamer at Khartum to Gondokoro, and following the Nile by boat and on foot to its source where it pours out of the lake, but owing to the run-down condition of my son Jack, caused by the dengue fever which he caught in Egypt, I have not dared to risk the dangers of the malaria, black-water fever, and sleeping sickness so common in the wilds of the upper Sudan, and therefore have changed my route to the Suez Canal, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean. All travel in East Africa was reorganized when the Suez Canal was built. About three thousand years ago, when the Phœnicians had settled on the north coast, founding Carthage, they had pushed their way into Egypt and even into Abyssinia, and a little later had come down along the east coast of the Indian Ocean, forming settlements probably as far south as Mozambique. After Carthage was conquered by the Romans, these East African settlements were seized by the Arabs, who colonized the coast of the Indian Ocean as far south as Sofala. Later still, under the Ptolemies, Greek traders visited many of these Arab settlements, and in the twelfth century Zanzibar first appeared on European maps of the world as one of the Mohammedan colonies. Then Columbus discovered America and Vasco da Gama, who was the first to round the Cape of Good Hope, anchored at Mombasa in 1498. Until the Suez Canal was constructed, the only sea route from Europe to the ports of the Indian Ocean was by the Cape of Good Hope. There are ships still making the voyage that way, but for the most part they end their trips at one of the eastern ports of South America. The ships that formerly went to China and India had to go around Africa, the trip to Bombay from London being over eleven thousand miles. By the Suez Canal it is just about seven thousand miles, making a saving of four thousand miles, or a thousand miles more than the distance from New York to Liverpool.