DOWN THE RED SEA tant in that respect than now. It had many inns and hotel tents outside, and was well supplied with dancing girls and the other side-show features of a true pilgrimage centre. Then the Suez Canal came and killed it. Its big houses fallen to ruins, the port has become a village of one-story huts. There are emerald mines near it, however, and the desert about shows evidences of having been once worked for gold.

I regret that I was not able to stop at Jidda, the port of Mecca, to which I have already referred. It is one of the most interesting places on the Red Sea, for one hundred thousand or more pilgrims pass through it every year. While at Omdurman, in the Sudan, I saw something like fourteen hundred Mohammedans on their way by railroad across the Nubian Desert to Port Sudan where they expected to get a ship for Jidda. Some of them had been ten years on the way, yet their religious enthusiasm had pot waned. They had started out upon camels from the borders of Timbuktu and had been forced to sell their mounts to buy food. After that they had walked from oasis to oasis earning enough money to carry them onward. There were so many in the party that the British govern¬ ment officials had to divide them up into batches and send on a trainload or so at a time.

In the centuries since the worship of Mohammed began millions of pilgrims have walked over the sixty-five miles of hot sand from Jidda to Mecca. Worshippers go thither from all parts of North Africa and from the eastern coast of the Mediterranean as well as from India and southern Arabia. Jidda takes her toll from each of them. The people live by fleecing the devotees. The town, though full of hotels, is noted for its discomforts. It has a poor 221