Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/429

 we have seen in four days, and we remained in sight of it all day. Between us and land a ship was steaming southward, and a school of porpoises also appeared, disturbing the sea for miles. They were as lazy as the natives, and jumped in a leisurely, slow way that amused us. About noon, Cape Guardafui appeared. Guardafui is the most eastern extremity of the African continent, and when we rounded it about noon, we were in the Arabian sea, and the ship's prow was pointing toward home: due west. The rocky point around which we turned to enter the Arabian Sea, bears a striking resemblance to a huge crouching lion, when viewed from a distance. We passed quite near the shore, but saw no signs of life: nothing but a desolate waste of sand and rock After rounding Guardafui, we were in the Gulf of Aden, which looks small on the map, but we shall steam on its surface thirty hours, out of sight of land, before reaching Aden and the entrance to the Red Sea. We are now in that section referred to by Kipling as "East of Suez:" land of poor crops, poverty and misery. A few days' sail to the east from Guardafui, and the traveler reaches India, where ignorance is worshipped as mystery, and where men of the tenth or hundredth generation know no more than did their fathers Africa is larger than North America; it is almost as large as the American continent, and is controlled by such enlightened natives as England, Germany, France, Italy, Belgium and Portugal, yet from one end of the country to the other there is no such thing as a public school for the natives. Indeed, I have heard many Englishmen openly declare that education is the ruination of