On the map, the Red Sea looks like a slit between Asia and Africa, but this slit is actually two hundred miles wide in some places and twelve hundred miles long, or nearly half the distance from Suez to Mombasa, my destination on the east coast of Africa. Much of it is so deep that if the Blue Ridge Mountains were set in it only their higher peaks would show. It is so long that if it began at Ireland and extended westward across the Atlantic, it would reach halfway to Canada. If it could be lifted up and laid down upon the United States with Suez at Philadelphia, Bab-el-Mandeb would be a hundred miles or so beyond Omaha, Nebraska, and all the way between would be a canal as wide as from New York to Washington, or wide enough to accommodate all the navies of the world abreast, and leave a hundred miles or more to spare. This great waterway narrows almost to a point at each end. At Bab-el-Mandeb, where it leaves the Indian Ocean, it is no wider than the English Channel at Dover; at the north it is lost at the Suez Canal. Starting at Bab-el-Mandeb, the coasts broaden out and then run almost straight to the upper end, where they fork into two gulfs inclosing the lower part of the Sinai Peninsula. These two gulfs are those of Suez and Akabah. The Gulf of Suez is one hundred and seventy miles long, and has been joined to the Mediterranean by the Suez Canal. The Gulf of Akabah is one hundred and ten miles long, and for a time there was talk of making a canal from it to the Mediterranean. The air on the Red Sea is so salty that one can almost eat eggs without seasoning. If one hundred pounds of its waters are boiled down, four pounds of salt will be found in the bottom of the kettle. The evaporation is so great that were it not for the inflow of the Indian Ocean the sea would, within less than a century, vanish in the air and leave in its place one immense block of salt. I had expected to find the Red Sea coasts more thickly populated. There are no cities of any size and very few villages. Suez has large docks, but its trade is small, and it has nothing like the growth which men thought would come with the use of the canal. Have you ever heard of the town of Kosseir? It is a Red Sea port on the west coast some distance south of Suez which at one time had a great trade. It was formerly the end of a caravan route from the Nile, and the Children of Israel crossed over that way and took boats for the Sinai Peninsula to reach the mountains where Moses received the Commandments.