Massawa is built on an island, joined to the mainland by a dike. Its climate, fully as hot as Djibouti, is even more difficult for white men to endure. It lies in a region of perpetual calm; the Dahlak Islands shut off the breeze; and the water among the reefs often reaches a temperature of ninety eight degrees or more…For several days we lay at anchor in the little bay at Djumelay and let the news spread that a mograbi (one who lives west of the setting sun) had come to buy pearls.
-Pearls, Arms, and Hashish: Pages from the Life of a Red Sea Navigator, Henry de Monfreid
Our group’s motor launch had taken us from Massawa to one of the closer-in Dahlaks where the itinerary offered either a swim off the boat at anchor or a walk through a Saho goatherders’ village. Everybody but two wanted to go ashore so I arranged the landing party and asked the woman of the stay aboard couple, a skin-tanned-to-leather super skinny fifty-something New Yorker who had been acting like an insufferable cultural know-it-all the whole time, to wait for us to leave before getting into her suit, and then to slip into the water off the stern without drawing attention to herself. The crewmen were young guys and I knew Eritrea was not accustomed to Western beachwear norms, not like the French hotel pools in Djibouti or Sharm El-Sheikh’s budget natur kultur, and certainly not like the Euro-topless scene in the Seychelles. But she did it anyway.
Right on the bow where I and the boat crew were helping the others into the dingy she stripped off her shirt and shorts to show us all what she wore underneath- the skimpiest string bikini this side of Saint-Tropez. All Eritrean eyes onboard fell on her, including for what I knew were all the Saho goatherder eyes on shore. So I lost it. Breaking my usual motto that the paying customer is always right, I told her to put her damn clothes back on and wait for us to be gone. At that point I didn’t care what they might do to an unprotected female mograbi in our absence. At least we weren’t in Danakil country yet. At least she didn’t have testicles for them to take as trophies.