Following the footsteps of Moses

“And Moses stretched his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the waters to go back by a strong east wind ... and made the sea dry land.”

THE CHILDREN of Israel escaped to Sinai and the Egyptians perished “in the midst of the sea”. With all due respect to the book of Exodus, the Red Sea is exceedingly deep. It reaches 3,000 metres in places with a great ridge running down its centre. Only a fifth of it is less than 50 metres deep and underwater cliffs fall away sharply just out from the coast. The Israelites must have descended into a marine equivalent of the Grand Canyon.

Africa, moving steadily northwards, has smashed into Europe, pushing up the Alps and Pyrenees. The traffic jam of tectonic plates produced a long rift valley where the Red Sea is today. About 40 million years ago, a great crack appeared. The Arabian peninsula snapped open, like a door on a hinge (you can almost hear it creak as you look at the map) and the waters of the Indian Ocean flooded into the valley, just as the Bible says they did when Pharaoh’s army tried to make the fatal crossing. With no rivers flowing into it, the sea is unusually salty. Named after its red corals, this warm spur of the Indian Ocean has marine creatures of every sort, from dolphins to turtles. The only notable absentees are sea-snakes.