Lowell Thomas Crosses the Red Sea

There was no passenger accommodation, so that we had to sleep out on the deck with the donkeys and mules.

Continuing Lawrence Launches Arab Desert Campaign,
our selection from With Lawrence in Arabia by Lowell Thomas published in 1924. The selection is presented in fifteen easy 5-minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Lawrence Launches Arab Desert Campaign.

Time: 1917
Place: Along the Hejaz Railway

I remember that afternoon call as a series of surprises, of which the first was the beauty of the garden inside the ugly adobe outer walls of the shereef’s palace. The second was the variety of fluid refreshment placed before us. Surely Shereef Yusef el Hindi must have one of the genii from “The Arabian Nights” mixing drinks in his palace. Even in pre-prohibition days, when assigned to cover a national college fraternity convention, never was I invited to pass through such an ordeal by drink as I faced at Shereef Yusef el Hindi’s oasis. The third surprise came when I saw the attractive interior of his palace as we passed through on our way to a Moorish balcony near the roof, where we were confronted with another relay of drinks. But the climax came when I discovered that my host instead of being an African witch-doctor was a savant of wide learning. His library even contained Arabic translations of the speeches of Mr. Lloyd George, Lord Balfour, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. In fact I found that this Sudanese holy man knew more about the history of my own country than I did!

We discussed religion, and I was impressed by his spirit of tolerance. “I believe, as do all Moslems who deserve to be called educated,” said he, “that the fundamental principles underlying the world’s greatest religions—Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism—are the same; that there is but one God and that he is supreme; that we should be tolerant of the opinions of others; that all men should live together as brothers and do unto others as we would have others do unto us.”

It was not difficult to understand why Shereef Yusef el Hindi was looked upon as a holy man by his ignorant, half-civilized fellow-countrymen. His princely manners, his dignity and poise, his musical bell-like voice, his large, lustrous, hypnotic brown eyes, and his wisdom would have won him distinction in any country. He is not an Ethiopian but is a descendant of the Arabian tribe of Koreish to which Mohammed belonged.

Being a holy man in the Sudan is a lucrative profession. Shereef Yusef el Hindi spends most of his time naming babies. When a child is born the father comes running to him, prostrates himself at the shereef’s feet, and says, “O noble one, what name shall I bestow upon my child?”

Whereupon the holy man replies: “O faithful one, arise! Go thy way and return again upon the morrow.”

Then, when the father returns the next day, the shereef intones: “Allah be praised. In a vision last night the Prophet appeared and revealed to me that your faith should be rewarded and your child blessed with the name of his own daughter, Fatima. Five dollars, please!”

From Khartum we crossed the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan on the Red Sea. Here, as we had hoped, we found a tramp steamer bound for the Arabian coast. She was a much torpedoed cargo-boat which had been transferred from the British Indian coastal service to the Mediterranean, where during the first years of the war she had survived several harrowing years serving as a target for the kaiser’s U-boats. On board with us were 226 Sudanese sheep, 150 horses and mules from America and Australia, sixty-seven donkeys from Abyssinia, ninety-eight deserters from the Turkish army, eighty-two Egyptian fellaheen laborers, thirty-four Gordon Highlanders, six British officers, and two obsolete airplanes. Our crew consisted of Hindus, Javanese, Somalis, Berberines, and fuzzy-wuzzies. The skipper of this modern ark was a rotund, jovial Scotch-Irishman by the name of Rose. I doubt whether Captain Kidd in the palmiest days of Caribbean piracy ever put to sea with such a motley cargo and crew.

The different nationalities on board segregated themselves into little racial colonies and did their own cooking in various parts of the main deck. It would be impossible to imagine what the good ship Ozarda looked like after we had been at sea for a few days—and what she smelled like! Some of the Sudanese were from the Nubian Desert, where it is difficult enough to get water for drinking purposes, to say nothing of water for bathing; some of them had never had a real bath in their lives. But there was one of them whom the Highlanders nicknamed Bathing Bert. This man insisted on having his tub out of a bucket five times each day.

The Egyptian laborers entertained us incessantly with their fantastic ceremonial dances. There was not room enough for all of them to dance at a time, and so they went at it in relays. Some of them danced until they collapsed on the deck from exhaustion. Fainting, to them, was merely a sign that their spirits had been transported to heaven for a few minutes’ sojourn with the Almighty.

There was no passenger accommodation, so that we had to sleep out on the deck with the donkeys and mules. I bunked beside a mouse-colored mule from Hannibal, Missouri, the home of Mark Twain. She was very pessimistic. She seemed to be worrying about something back home and didn’t sleep well. Neither did I! Mark Twain would have lost his sense of humor if he had been in my place.

We had a British officer on board who was bound for the Persian Gulf. He was laboring under the erroneous impression that he had fallen heir to the mantle of George Robey or Harry Lauder. He used to tell a story until we were almost bored to extinction. I am going to repeat one of his tales, not because I think it is funny but because I know it is not funny! I want to show you the sort of thing we had to endure. He said that he was out hunting lions once in Central Africa; none of us doubted that for he had knocked about all over the world from Kamchatka to the Kameruns. He said that one day a lion jumped at him out of the bush but that he ducked just in time, causing the lion to go right over his head. Some minutes passed, and as the lion failed to return he crawled along on his stomach to reconnoiter. Coming to an open space he peered cautiously through the tall grass, and there he saw that same lion — practicing low jumps! One day we hit upon the idea of giving cigarettes to the Turkish deserters, who could understand only a few words of English, in order to get them to listen to his stories. They would laugh when he laughed, and it satisfied him and certainly relieved the rest of us.

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