Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/435

 parties ashore, unless heavily armed. During the hot, dry season, many of these towns are entirely deserted; the inhabitants go into the mountains, and remain there until the weather becomes endurable. The Red Sea has a shore-line of more than three thousand miles, yet the country surrounding it is so worthless that there is almost no town of importance on its shores, and no river runs into it. There is no rain in the vicinity of the Red Sea, and it loses eight feet every year from evaporation, which must be made up from other seas where there is more rain and less heat You hear a great deal of the "Mysticism of the East." This mysticism is as foolish as the doggerel used by children when they count the buttons on your coat: "Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief; doctor lawyer, merchant chief," etc. Mysticism never means anything. The West solves riddles, and discovers how to produce a hundred bushels of corn per acre: the East pays great attention to Mysticism, and has more poor, dirty and ignorant people than any other part of the world. When the plague breaks out in the East, as a result of foolish pilgrimages to Mecca or Benares, the pilgrims say the plague is a part of the Mysticism of the East, and continue to drink holy and dirty water. But the men of the West have a better doctrine: its chief tenet is, "Clean Up," and the plague disappears before it All our deck passengers left us at Aden. Men who spend half their time saying their prayers do not flourish in the great world west of Suez The passengers spend a good deal of their time in reading. I often hear them talking of the books they are reading. "How do you like it?" one will ask.