CHAPTER XXV THROUGH THE SUEZ CANAL BRING your steamer chair to the rail and look out from the deck of our ship over the Red Sea as we sail southward along the coast of East Africa. The sun is hot but we have an awning above us, and the salt breeze cools our cheeks. We have returned by rail and by river from Khartum to Cairo, have gone over the Nile delta to Port Said, have passed through the Suez Canal, and have sailed south into the Red Sea. We are now off the coast of Arabia, on our way into the Indian Ocean, bound for the port of Mombasa, whence we shall go across a mighty plateau to the great African lakes. Mom¬ basa is within a rifle shot of the Equator and only a few miles north of Zanzibar. It is at the southeastern end of Kenya Colony and is the terminus of the Uganda Railway which crosses that country to Kisumu, the chief port of Lake Victoria.

My original intention was to have reached Lake Victoria by taking the mail steamer at Khartum to Gondokoro, and following the Nile by boat and on foot to its source where it pours out of the lake, but owing to the run-down condition of my son Jack, caused by the dengue fever which he caught in Egypt, I have not dared to risk the dangers of the malaria, black-water fever, and sleeping sickness so common in the wilds of the upper Sudan, and therefore 208