Tide Marks by H.M. Tomlinson — Read

I was leaning on the rail of the bridge with the master, watching the brown scum, peculiar to the Red Sea, pass alongside with its not really pleasant smell, for it hints that the very deep itself is stagnant and decomposing; and I was foolish enough to tell him that to me the bearings of his excellent book of sailing directions were not only true, but magnetic. He half turned to me sharply, considered this remark and myself for a moment, and then made the noise of impatience in his throat. It was at the hour when we were passing into the Red Sea proper. The Ashrafi Islands were abeam, with Shadwán Island, the greatest of the group, the very picture in little of what this earth will be when its ichor will all have evaporated. Behind the barrier of outer islands is a labyrinth of reefs and coral patches where the signs of danger may be mistaken for the usual mirage, or an innocent and fortuitous shadow may have the obvious face of a genuine reef and thus scare a ship away on a safer course till she runs full upon the real and unannounced rocks. I mentioned to our captain that his book occasionally whispered of a few inexplicable tents to be seen on these uninhabited islands.

"Oh, tents! That's right. A man I know got aground here," he said, "and in half an hour his ship was surrounded by little boats. He never saw the coming of them. There they were. A year or two before the war a steamer got aground here one night, and at daybreak she was boarded by a big mob. The crew were stripped of their clothes. The Arabs were in a hurry to get the chief engineer's ring, so they cut his finger off. Then they tried to shift a copper steam pipe. Steam was still on, and they took an ax to it. The engineer told me it did his finger a lot of good when the Arabs got down to the steam. The pressure was all right."