DOWN THE RED SEA Eve lies buried. With the ship's glass we could almost see the place where lies the greatest grandmother of all man¬ kind. She rests outside the city wall in a tomb four hundred feet long and a mosque rises over her dust. The Mohammedan story has it that when Adam and Eve were banished from the Garden of Eden a strong west wind wafted the fairy form of Eve to Arabia, while Adam, with his heavier weight, fell down in Ceylon. There is a string of coral keys running from Ceylon to Hindustan, still known as Adam's Bridge, over which he started out on his long hunt for Eve. It took him two hundred years to find her, and the meeting was somewhere near Mec¬ ca. What became of Adam's bones the story does not say.

On the map, the Red Sea looks like a slit between Asia and Africa, but this slit is actually two hundred miles wide in some places and twelve hundred miles long, or nearly half the distance from Suez to Mombasa, my destination on the east coast of Africa. Much of it is so deep that if the Blue Ridge Mountains were set in it only their higher peaks would show. It is so long that if it began at Ireland and extended westward across the Atlantic, it would reach halfway to Canada. If it could be lifted up and laid down upon the United States with Suez at Philadelphia, Bab-el-Mandeb would be a hundred miles or so beyond Omaha, Nebraska, and all the way between would be a canal as wide as from New York to Washington, or wide enough to accommodate all the navies of the world abreast, and leave a hundred miles or more to spare.

This great waterway narrows almost to a point at each end. At Bab-el-Mandeb, where it leaves the Indian 219