Suez, which is a small-sized city with several thousand Europeans, is connected by train with Port Said, and also with Cairo and other parts of Egypt. The city is about thirteen hundred miles from Aden, Arabia, and just twenty-nine hundred and nineteen miles from Mombasa, where we are to enter the Colony of Kenya and make our way by rail across country to the Great Lakes. CHAPTER XXVI DOWN THE RED SEA The Red Sea is red hot! I have steamed many miles along the Equator, but this salt-water corridor leading to the Indian Ocean is much hotter. As deserts shut in the Red Sea on both sides, there are no fresh streams to cool it, and the tropical sun beats down upon the waters and sands from January to December. As a result, the temperature of the water at the surface is often one hundred degrees above zero, and it steams the air like a vast hot-water plant. The sun’s rays are bottled up by the deserts, which then act as enormous radiators. Consequently, the atmosphere is suffocating, and there seems to be only a trembling sheet of blue steel between us and the lower regions. Indeed, were it not for the electric fan in my cabin I should be unable to write. Outside upon deck we have double roofs of canvas to protect us from the sun, and many of the passengers sleep up there to escape the heat of the rooms below. Last night, in addition to the heat, we had to contend with a sandstorm, which covered our ship with red dust so fine that it got through the portholes and even into our beds. That storm came from Arabia, and may have swallowed some of the thousands of Mohammedan pilgrims on their way to Mecca. As our ship went through this mighty cauldron we passed Jidda, in Arabia, where, according to the Mohammedans, Eve lies buried. With the ship’s glass we could almost see the place where lies the greatest grandmother of all mankind. She rests outside the city wall in a tomb four hundred feet long and a mosque rises over her dust. The Mohammedan story has it that when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden a strong west wind wafted the fairy form of Eve to Arabia, while Adam, with his heavier weight, fell down in Ceylon. There is a string of coral keys running from Ceylon to Hindustan, still known as Adam’s Bridge, over which he started out on his long hunt for Eve. It took him two hundred years to find her, and the meeting was somewhere near Mecca. What became of Adam’s bones the story does not say.