A telegram with a procès-verbal was at once sent off to the Prince; Sa'íd Bey and Ra'íf Bey hastened to our aid, and Mr. Williams, superintending engineer of the Khedivíyyah line, with the whole of his staff, stripped and set to work at the peccant tubes and air-pump. They commenced with extinguishing a serious fire which burst from the waste-room--by no means pleasant when close to kegs of blasting-powder carefully sewn up in canvas. They laboured with a will, and before sunset Mr. Williams informed us that he would guarantee the engines for eight days, when we were starting on a dangerous cruise for four months. He also supplied us with an Egyptian boiler-maker and with eleven instead of sixty new tubes: we lost forty-two of the old ones between Suez and El-Muwaylah. Before sunset we made a trial trip, the wretched old kettle acting tant bien que mal; we returned to re-embark the soldiers and the mules, and we set out for the second time at 5.30 p.m.
The Mukhbir, 130 feet long, 380 tons, and 80 to go horse-power, under charge of the English or rather Scotch engineer, Mr. David Duguid, who had taken the place of the two Arab firemen, began with 7 1/2 knots an hour, 68 revolutions per minute, and a pressure of 9 lbs. to the square inch. The condenser-vacuum was 26 inches (30 being complete)--13 lbs. Next morning the rate declined to six miles in consequence of the boiler leaking, and matters became steadily worse. As a French writer says of the genre humain, we were placed, not entre le bien et le mal, but entre le mal et le pire. After sundry narrow escapes in the Gulf of 'Akabah, we were saved, as will be seen, by a manner of miracles. Briefly, the Mukhbir caused us much risk, heartburn, and loss of time.
Seven a.m. (December 11th) found us crossing the Birkat Fara'ún--Pharaoh's Gulf--some sixty miles from the great port. Its horrors to native craft I have already described in my "Pilgrimage." Between this point and Ras Za'faránah, higher up, the wind seems to split: a strong southerly gale will be blowing, whilst a norther of equal pressure prevails at the Gulf-head, and vice versâ. Suez, indeed, appears to be, in more ways than one, a hydrographical puzzle. When it is low water in and near the harbour, the flow is high between the Straits of Jobal and the Daedalus Light; and the ebb tide runs out about two points across the narrows, whilst the flood runs in on a line parallel with it. Finally, when we returned, hardly making headway against an angry norther, Suez, enjoying the "sweet south," was congratulating the voyagers upon their weather.