Along the whole coast-line from Kosseir to Sawakin one may say that there are no permanent places of residence, if we except the tiny Egyptian military stations, with their fort and huts for the soldiers, at Halaib, Mohammed Gol, and Darour; it is practically desert all the way, and is only visited by the nomad Ababdeh and Bisharin tribes, when, after the rains, they can obtain there a scanty pasturage for their flocks. During the Ptolemaic and early Arab periods the condition of affairs was very different; several considerable towns stood on this coast, now marked only by heaps of sand and a few fallen walls. In spite of its aridity, this coast has a wonderful charm of its own; its lofty, deeply serrated mountains are a perpetual joy to look upon, and the sunset effects were unspeakably glorious, rich in every conceivable colour, and throwing out the sharp outline of the pointed peaks against the crimson sky. The nature of this coast-line is singularly uniform, and offers tremendous obstacles to navigation, owing to the great belt of coral reefs along it, through which the passage was often barely wide enough for our dhow to pass, and against which on more than one occasion we came in unpleasant contact. The bay of Berenice, for example, was for this reason known in ancient times as akathartos kolpos, and is still known as 'Foul Bay'; it can only be navigated with the greatest care by native pilots accustomed to the various aspects of the water, which in many places only just covers the treacherous reefs. All boats are obliged to anchor during the night either just inside the reefs or in the numerous coves along the coast, which are caused by the percolations of fresh water through the sandbeds of rivers into the sea, and these prevent the coral insect from erecting its continuous wall. The rapidly succeeding little harbours formed in the coral reef are called _mersa_, or anchorage, by the Arabs, from _mersat_, anchor.