THE DESERTS 
21 
trains de luxe that mock distance and traverse the wilder¬ 
ness in hours where our pioneers—such as Baker—spent 
weeks of laborious trekking-. 
From the moment of quitting Red Sea shores, the 
Sudan leaves one in no manner of doubt that we are 
back in Africa —-Africa et prceterea nihil —attractive as 
ever in its appalling (yet entrancing) sterility. Scarce 
have the coral-built quays and warehouses of Port Sudan, 
with the red funnels of our good ship Gaika , sunk 
behind the dunes, than we are plunged in medias res — 
into a desolation of sand, stunted scrub, and scraggy 
thorn. 
Quickly traversing the narrow maritime plain and 
entering the hills, the railway climbs out for ioo miles 
to its culminating point at “Summit,” 3014 feet above 
sea-level, the gradient averaging 1 in 100, and never a 
“level” save only at the stations. 
No prospect can well be more bleak and barren than 
that of these great black naked hills that overlook the 
Red Sea—a chaos of crags, shale-slopes, and disintegrated 
lava, upon which it would appear incredible that even an 
ibex could find pasturage. Their barrenness, however, 
is more apparent than real; for these hills are dew- 
drenched each night by the mists that sweep in from the 
sea, and the moisture thus distributed fosters a scant 
and lowly plant-life, largely mossy and cryptogamic, yet 
sufficient to maintain herds of ariel, gazelles, and ibex— 
one of the latter we actually descried from the railway, 
silhouetted on a sky-line 2000 yards away. The climatic 
facts just stated we only discovered later, during a delightful 
expedition among these hills in March and April, as 
described in subsequent chapters. 
The higher peaks exceed 5000 feet and are largely of 
pyramidal contour, but include precipitous faces, crags, 
and great fang-like pinnacles that give fantastic skylines, 
recalling Pringle’s South-African lines :— 
