postponed her departure on account of the heavy weather; so there was a good excuse for the skipper of our little open craft remaining at this safe anchorage until the morning.
The following day, November the 14th, broke wildly; the clouds were rushing across the sky, the gale was howling through our rigging, and the dhow was tumbling about and straining uneasily at her anchor. But my skipper was no timid mariner. On the contrary, like most of these fatalistic, happy-go-lucky Mussulman sailor-men, of whom so many are lost each year in these treacherous and stormy Red Sea waters, he was perhaps what Europeans would have called foolhardy; to put it more correctly, he placed more faith in Kismet than in the barometer. So, at the first appearance of light in the east, the skipper roused his men; the anchor was weighed; the great foresail was hoisted, to an Arab chanty lustily shouted; the vessel listed for a moment until the water was running over her lee-side into her hold, righted herself, and then was off like a grey-*hound through the smooth water inside the reef. 'The other dhow has had twenty-four hours' start,' I remarked. 'What of that?' replied the skipper. 'She, too, I know, must have been lying at anchor somewhere within the reef. We shall be at Massowah before her if we sail the El Hamdi as we should.' A race is always interesting, so I encouraged the crew by a promise of backshish if our dhow proved the winner, with the result that the
