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"Since leaving the shores of India," says Major Harris, "the party had gradually been in training towards a disregard of dirty water. On board a ship of any description, the fluid is seldom very clear or very plentiful. At Cape Aden, there was little perceptible difference between the sea water and the land water.
"The idea of allowing the Caledonia to travel without protection! Think of all the men-of-war lying idle at Bombay, Aden, and Port Said! And yet nobody thought there was any occasion to send one or more of them to escort this splendid ship, with nearly a thousand Englishmen on board, and a cargo worth more than a million. Had our commanders no suspicion that the French ships were so near?"
It is pleasant to look forward to the civilization of Abyssinia, and other more remote places, by means of commercial intercourse with Aden.
Many of them listened to me with more faith about food and medicines because I knew something of the Koran, and could recite their Bismillah and their call to prayer. At last we arrived at Aden, where a troop of Somali lads came on board, with their bawling voices and their necklaces and their mop-heads of mutton wool, now and then plastered with lime.
The next day, as the camel did not come by noon, I wrote a letter to Aden reporting the circumstance, and begging some retribution would be taken from the Akil, as it was obvious to any man who knows these savages, that Abdie could not have been ignorant of one single feature in the whole of these transactions.
He urged her to lay bare her heart, and she laid it bare. One evening it was heavenly moonlight on the Indian Ocean, and they were two days past Aden on the long south-east run to Ceylon she came and stood before him with a small packet in her hand.
But at last the drowning man looked up and saw the woman so, and, with a last quiver of the arms, he sank from sight. When he was gone, the woman's arms dropped away from me; but when I turned to speak to her, she, too, had gone. I awoke. Two stewards were talking in the passage, and one was saying, "She'll get under way by daybreak, and it will be a race with the 'Porcupine' to Aden.
One of the Jews he sent back with a journal and verbal accounts of his travels. With the other he set off again for Aden; thence to Ormuz, at the entrance of the Gulf of Persia, where all the rich merchandise of the East was brought to be transported thence by Syria and Egypt into Europe.
Antimony, in the East, is used in a score of ways from its employment in the form of kohl, for the darkening of women's eyes, to the chemical by-products, always in demand by Syrian apothecaries. This was the only antimony mine between Aden and Germany. Its shipments were in constant demand. Its revenues were a big item on the credit side of the Cabell ledger.
Being the great port of call and coaling station linking Occident, Orient and Australasia, a traveler naturally wants to inspect the place and stretch his legs on shore, while his ship is stocking with fuel to carry it to Aden, Singapore or to an antipodean port. Tiffin or dinner on terra firma is likewise coveted by the traveler with appetite jaded by weeks of sea-cooking.
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