304 DR. HOOKER’S MISSION TO INDIA. 
heavily bribed to keep in some sort of order. In many places the 
latter is really good, as where the flats of pebbles are broad and long, ~ 
from which the Arabs remove the large stones, though so long only 
as they are paid for doing it, for as soon as the money is stopped, 
they will replace all the biggest stones, and thus render the track 
impassable. 
From the highest level, to the Red Sea at Suez, is one uninter- 
rupted slope of eight miles long, apparently so uniform and 
smooth that you might fancy rolling a cannon-ball from the top 
into the sea: it is uniformly covered with pebbles and rounded 
lumps of rock, as big as the head. The Colocynth was the only 
plant I saw here, and that very sparingly: it straggles, and is of 
the same hue almost as the soil, the great yellow apples alone 
betraying its existence. The valley, or rather flat slope, is many 
miles broad, and bounded to the south by high rugged hills, hot, 
red, and hazy: it is, indeed, a howling wilderness ; and the desert 
of Sinai opposite looked no better. 
There was scarcely a boat (but the steamer) visible on the sea; 
and Suez itself on the shore wore a truly desolate appearance, 
with no green thing near it. At 4 o’clock we entered the town, 
a miserable collection of mud and stone huts, with a crazy Mosque, 
and a large white hotel on the sea-brink, at which we were set down. 
This being the position of the passage of the Children of Tsrael, 
we could not help looking about and trying to grasp some natural 
feature that might afterwards vividly recall the spot, but there 
was none: looking north, an arm of the sea wound up to where 
a canal in the more glorious days of Egypt connected the Nile 
and the Red Sea; a few low hills there bounded the horizon. 
Westward lay the unbroken sweep of Desert we had bowled along 
at full gallop a few minutes before; southwest, the rugged hills 
_ which characterize a great part of the western shore of the Red 
Sea. To the east, the water was about two miles across OT - 
thereabouts, bounded by a long flat, from which rise the moun- 
tains of the peninsula of Sinai. Due south, the unruffled and : 
unbroken waters of the Red Sea stretched away, far as the eye 
could see, with three steamers lying a few miles off the shallows xe 2 
