I swerved and tacked towards the land. For three days we battled against a raging wind. At times the sea was untenable and nearly swallowed us up bodily. We only just managed to keep heading north, and in two days we only advanced a few poor little miles. I began to wonder if I should ever be able to enter the Gulf of Suez by the strait of Jubal. It seemed nearly as bad as the Bab-el-Mandeb. But on my chart I saw the great archipelagos and the labyrinths of reefs in the Bay of Gimsa, to the west of the strait. I thought it would be safer to pass through them than to affront the choppy and dangerous waves raised by the north-west wind between the island of Chadwin and the coast of Arabia. It really seemed useless to continue this exhausting struggle, so I decided to give up for the night and seek shelter behind the island of Safadja, in the large bay which stretches at the foot of a picturesque mountain and is sheltered from all the winds. The mountains were still of the same nature, so tortured and bare that they looked like the skeletons of mountains, with giddily soaring needles and deep, narrow ravines down which rivers of gravel streamed towards the sea.
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