1900] A Man Drozvned 353 



did not seem to know much about it. He told us he had only left the 

 deck ten minutes when the thing happened. [This turned out after- 

 wards to have been quite untrue. He had come on board late, having 

 been at some entertainment at Suez, and gone to bed early without giv- 

 ing any proper instructions as to the course. No watch was kept, and we 

 drove straight on a coral reef, without so much as slackening speed 

 or with a cry of breakers ahead ! We must be clear eight miles out of 

 our course, and it looks like bad seamanship. Here we are, anyhow, 

 stuck fast on a line of sand banks (they proved to be a reef about 

 a mile from the shore) and with small chance of getting off to-day or 

 any other day. The steamer is miserably ill supplied with boats, 

 and still more miserably with seamen, there are only four boats capable 

 of taking off at most a dozen passengers each, and of these one is 

 already lost. They launched it, the Captain says, in order to put 

 out a hawser for an anchor to windward, but it was swamped by a 

 breaker, and at least one man has been drowned. I saw another 

 holding on to the hawser for some minutes, and we thought he would 

 be swept away too, but at last he got hold of a rope and hitched it 

 round him, and was pulled up the ship side, but it was a near shave. 

 The boat drifted away, and is now on the sandbank (reef) bottom 

 upwards, and five lifebuoys, which were thrown to the drowning men, 

 are drifting on shore. The captain asked me about the nature of the 

 country on which we had run, the shore of the Sinai penisula, and I 

 offered to let my Bedouin, Suliman, go in a boat if they could put 

 him safely on shore when the wind drops ; he would then take a mes- 

 sage to Tor, which is not more than forty miles away, asking help. 

 Suliman, however, is very unwilling to go, now that he has seen 

 the feluca swamped and the man drowned, nor will I let him attempt 

 it until the wind goes down. [It was Suliman's first experience of 

 being at sea, and, like most Bedouins, he was frightened at being off 

 his own element.] Should it become calm I shall propose that we are 

 all sent on shore here with our baggage, as we are the only passengers 

 for Tor, and we have provisions enough with us for a fortnight. I 

 am writing this at 9.45 a.m. 



" 1.30 p.m. — Things look worse than they did. The tide going down 

 has shown that we are on a coral reef, which may be half a mile 

 in width, with, perhaps, three miles of comparatively still water 

 beyond it to the shore. Also the wind has become stronger, and, though 

 the waves do not break over the deck, we are beginning to heel over 

 in rather an alarming way. I finished Tolstoy's ' Resurrection ' this 

 morning. It is a most depressing book, and makes one as willing as 

 one can easily be to leave a life so miserable as Tolstoy shows it. 

 I don't know which is the more hopeless, the picture of polite society 

 en decomposition, or that of his convicts and political prisoners who 



