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Afterwards it was revealed to us that the cave is twenty miles from Mosaina on the akaba, that there is no water near, no village at Mosaina, no means of getting forage; so, as in that case farther progress was useless, as well as impossible, we proposed to return the following day to Kosseir, helping ourselves, if possible, with a boat from Raida.
We travelled all the first night, but the second we anchored near Safaia Island, and the third at a place called Sheikh Ganem, in front of the Ashrafi Light, and the fourth day found us at Kosseir, which means 'little castle. The Government steamer Abbas, which had started one day after us and gone straight down 'outside', had only got in two hours before us, and we had been 'inside', through the reefs, and stopped all night, so we thought we had not done badly.
We stayed two nights in the harbour to make our final victualling arrangements. Kosseir, our last really civilised point, is now a wretched place, though twice in its existence it has been of importance, owing to its road connection with Keneh on the Nile. Kosseir is waiting for a railway before it can again recoup its fortunes.
There was always a large surface of wet wood to dry up. Leaving Kosseir on the last day of 1895, we reached Ras Bernas on the second day of 1896, stopping, of course, each night, always rolling and tossing about, and always keeping a sharp look out for coral reefs, the watchers shouting advice continually to Reis Hamaya.
In June 1801, away back in the primitive days, an Anglo-Indian brigade 5000 strong ordered from Bombay, reached Kosseir on the Red Sea bound for the Upper Nile at Keneh thence to join Abercromby's force operating in Lower Egypt. The distance from Kosseir to Keneh is 120 miles across a barren desert with scanty and unfrequent springs.
Though we rose so early next morning that we dressed by candle-light, we were not up nearly so early as Imam Sharif, who, being sleepy and misled by a candle in our tent, aroused his followers and made them light their fire for breakfast at midnight. Kind old Don Quixote and many others walked with us a mile to Ras Dis, where we were to embark; this is the harbour of the town of Kosseir.
The more civil people were to us the more enraged we were with him, and I think if the servants had carried out their threats against him when he should be on the dhow, the masters would not have interfered. It is fifteen miles from Raida to Kosseir. We were quite determined, after the severe lesson we had had two days previously, to go to windward of Sarrar.
About the beginning of the sixteenth century, Albuquerque the "Terrible" revived the scheme of turning the Nile into the Red Sea, with the hope of destroying the transit trade through Egypt by way of Kosseir.
The long line of black basalt, jutting into capes here and there, is thought by the Arabs to be formed by the ashes of infidel towns. The tiny port of Kosseir is just a nook where the boats can nestle behind a small, low, natural breakwater of the basalt. Boats lie on either side, according to the wind.
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.
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