Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/446

 proper we had been running at five miles an hour. At Suez, we took on a special lighting apparatus; not a headlight, but a searchlight. This was attached to our prow, and lighted our way The engineer of the "Burgermeister," a fat German we all admire, sat on deck while we were passing through the canal, reading a newspaper. I asked him how often he had been through, and he guessed that he had made the trip seventy times. His ship makes four trips a year around Africa.

—When I went on deck at 5:30 this morning, the sun was just peeping out of the Mediterranean, and Port Said was in sight. I was the only passenger on deck, and although I expected Adelaide every moment, she did not appear until we were tied up in Port Said, an hour and a half later; the Suez Canal greatly excited me, although I had been through it before, but it did not greatly excite Adelaide. Half a dozen Arab sailboats, loaded with coal, passed in the canal; they had the peculiar sails seen on boats on the Nile, and were so old that I wondered they did not fall to pieces. On the larger boats were three men, and two on the smaller ones. The masts were very tall, and in this flat country the sails catch enough wind to push the boats along When Adelaide appeared at 7:30, I proposed that we go ashore before breakfast. She agreed to the proposition, and we were walking the streets of Port Said ten minutes later, as the ship was tied up within a hundred feet of the principal street Port Said is said to be a very