One thing necessary to the happiness of a nature-lover the desert can never supply. One needs some sight of luxuriant, riotous life, some equivalent for the rapid growth of grass and trees, that overflowing of life that in other lands causes every vacant inch of soil to bear some weed or flower. The satisfaction of this desire is easily found _in_ the Red Sea, not above it. At present the love of the sea gardens is an esoteric pleasure, some day we hope it may become as universal as the love of wild nature inland. Corals to take the place of plants, fishes and lower animals of all kinds, beautiful, bizarre, useful and poisonous, making gardens of teeming life under water, where the very worms are often beautiful as flowers. In the harbours where the water is stagnant, but clearer than any British sea, besides corals are weeds of all kinds and shapes, among which swim numbers of little fish of comical form, quaintly tame and gorgeously coloured. The biologist knows, however, that these strangely coloured weeds, brown, grey, green, violet, red and yellow, are mostly animals like the corals, some are sponges, some, like clusters of brown or grey daisies, a kind of cousin of the coral polyps. That large feathery flower, white, yellow, or reddish brown, will vanish like a flash if touched. It is nothing more nor less than the head of a worm, not much like the slow-moving senseless earthworm, but one which builds a house for its protection among crannies of the stones, into which it can withdraw its plumed head, sensitive to even a passing shadow. The multitude of forms assumed by the corals, their frequently gorgeous colours, equal anything to be seen in a land garden. These grow in greatest luxuriance outside the harbour where the water is of astonishing clarity. It is owing to the vigour of their growth that the edge of the reef is nearly a vertical wall, so that looking down strange beautiful shapes are seen one below another, weird fish entering and leaving their lairs under the coral tangle, till in the pure blue depths the forms of coral and fish become indistinct and pass into the haze of water 60 feet or more deep. The portion of the coast I have described is typical of the whole. The mountains may be lower or higher, the plain is narrower in the south, broader in the north, and the sea is varied with a few islands about Rawaya and islets of coral rock or sand form the Suakin Archipelago. These sand cays, if always above highest water-level, are peculiar in bearing quite a dense border of low-growing woody plants, at a level immediately above high tide. The rocky islets are almost entirely bare, yellow in colour, surrounded by cliffs like those described at Shêkh Barûd (Port Sudan), and generally level-topped.