The World and Its People Part 59

Around the Delta we find very noticeable signs of the gradual sinking of the ground. What were known as the "Baths of Cleopatra" at Alexandria have already sunk below the level of the water.

Several changes, due to the annual inundation, have taken place. In 1784 a lagoon, or small lake, was formed at Aboukir by the invasion of the sea. The bed of what now const.i.tutes Lake Menzaleh was once a densely populated region.

The Delta presents the appearance of an immense marsh during the season of inundation; the various islands, villages, towns, and plantations can barely be discerned above the water's level.

The houses of the well-to-do peasants in the Nile villages are built of bricks dried in the sun; the chief magistrate usually has a more pretentious house built of bricks that have been baked in regular ovens or kilns; the humbler peasants content themselves with huts, which they form from the mud of the Nile and roof over with the leaves and stems of the palm. The whole is then plastered with a coating of mud.

In these villages, a minaret towers above the various houses and hotels; while a few sycamores spread their leafy crowns and make the chief ornament of the village. Slender date trees sway in the breeze, and the long racemes of the acacia shed their delicate perfume abroad.

The rains of the tropics, to which the rise of the Nile is due, reach Egypt about the middle of June; they do not reach the Delta till about the end of the month.

The rise of the river dates from the appearance of the red water, about the middle of July. The water does not reach its maximum height till near the end of September. By the middle of October it has sunk very perceptibly, and by the month of April has gradually subsided to its minimum depth.

By the end of November the irrigated land has dried sufficiently to allow of its being sown. Soon the eye is gladdened by the sight of a rich covering of green crops which brighten the landscape till the close of February. In March comes the harvest time when all the crops are gathered and stored.

Since the days of Moses, Egypt has been a.s.sociated in the mind with plague, pestilence, and famine. It can by no means be considered a healthy country. Ophthalmia, a distressing disease of the eyes, prevails to an alarming extent.

It is no uncommon thing to find not only the father, mother, and children in a family suffering from the loss of sight in one or both eyes, but even the cat, dog, and donkey may share the same affliction.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SUEZ Ca.n.a.l.]

Lack of general care and cleanliness is believed to be the chief cause of the disease. The strange apathy of the people, no doubt, has some influence in spreading the disease; for they seem to accept blindness as one of the decrees of Fate.

The world may well be proud of man's triumph over the forces of nature, upon viewing the Suez Ca.n.a.l. The construction of it was a scheme from the time of the greatest antiquity. It was left for France with her enterprise and science to achieve this brilliant victory over nature, and to add fame to her name through the accomplishment of so wonderful a feat.

It is an undisputed fact, that in the days of ancient history the Red Sea and the Mediterranean were indirectly connected by a ca.n.a.l. We can with no certainty, however, fix the date of its construction. Some writers place the date as far back as six hundred years before Christ.

The subject remains wrapped in mystery. Aristotle and Pliny ascribe its construction to a half-mythical personage. Some writers believe the Persian king, Darius, was its constructer. Others ascribe it to the Ptolemies, so that the originator and maker remain unknown.

Such a ca.n.a.l did exist. It began about a mile and a half from Suez, and extended in a northwesterly direction, through a remarkable series of natural depressions, to ancient Bubastis on the eastern branch of the Nile.

The ca.n.a.l was ninety-two miles long. Sixty miles of this extent had been cut through by the labor of man. The width varied from one hundred and eight to one hundred and sixty-five feet, the depth was fifteen feet.

Pliny, an ancient writer, declared it to have been thirty feet deep.

History does not state how long the ca.n.a.l was used. It finally became choked with sand deposits and remained unused until the second century A.D., when it was cleared for navigation.

Again, in course of time, it became practically useless from sand deposits. It remained in this condition till the conquest of Egypt by Amron. He had it reopened and named it "The Ca.n.a.l of the Prince of the Faithful."

It remained open for nearly a century. In 767 A.D. the sands again conquered, and in this condition it was left till the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon Bonaparte. The attention of modern Europe was then directed to it. A number of engineers were employed to survey it and report upon it; but no result followed their report.

The subject continued to agitate the public mind from time to time; yet no definite action took place till 1847, when France, England, and Austria sent commissioners for the purpose of ascertaining accurately the difference in level of the two seas, the Red and the Mediterranean.

Their report was somewhat astonishing. Instead of a difference of thirty feet in level, as had been previously reported, the seas were found to have precisely the same level. One strong difference was noted, namely, a tide of six and a half feet at one end, and one and a half at the other.

In 1853 an examination was made, but the results remained unchanged.

Various plans were projected. One commissioner, who did not believe it possible to construct a ca.n.a.l, proposed a railroad from Cairo to Suez.

Some years later such a railroad was opened to the public. It was devoted to the overland transportation of the British, Indian, and Australian mails.

France, in her energy, was not satisfied with the report of the English commissioner, and later caused to be published in a prominent journal, a plan to connect the two seas by way of Alexandria and a point some six miles below Suez.

In the year 1854 Count de Lesseps, a well-known member of the French representatives in Egypt, attracted the attention of the public by the originality of his plans. Two years later he obtained from the Pacha the exclusive right to construct a ship ca.n.a.l from Tyneh to Suez.

Count de Lesseps' plan differed from all previous ones, for he purposed cutting directly through the isthmus to Suez, rather than to follow an oblique course and to connect the ca.n.a.l with the Nile.

The great masterpiece of his plan was to construct two harbors, one at either end of the ca.n.a.l, Tyneh and Suez.

On the Mediterranean Sea he purposed carrying the harbor five miles out from land. This he deemed necessary in order to obtain depth enough to float a ship drawing twenty-three feet of water. Any natural harbor he knew would be obstructed by the vast quant.i.ties of mud and sand brought down annually by the Nile in its pa.s.sage to the sea.

As many as thirty million cubic feet are thus carried down annually, to be driven by the prevailing winds along the sh.o.r.e in an easterly direction down towards the southern coast line of Palestine.

Count de Lesseps calculated that to construct such a harbor as he wished would require from three to twelve million cubic yards of stone. Herein lay the great difficulty; for there were no large stone quarries except at a great distance from Tyneh.

De Lesseps planned to carry the pier at Suez three miles out from land.

He foresaw many difficulties before he could hope to see his plan completed, yet these difficulties did not seem to him so insurmountable as those on the Mediterranean Sea.

Naturally, his project met with much opposition; but finally public opinion declared the plan, with some modifications, to be practical, and that the construction of such a ca.n.a.l would be profitable to commerce. A company was formed and at the end of five years the ca.n.a.l, at its Mediterranean entrance at Port Said in the eastern portion of the Delta, was finished.

From Port Said the ca.n.a.l had to cross about twenty miles of Lake Menzaleh, a shallow body of salt water, which in general appearance strongly suggested the lagoons of Venice. Beyond the lake much more labor had to be expended, owing to the varying height of the land above sea level. Some twenty-two miles of ground, varying in height from thirty to eighty feet, had to be cut through.

The work of excavation was most laborious, owing to the nature of the soil, which was often mixed with clay. The vast quant.i.ties of sand seemed endless, even with the aid of dredging machines and elevators, in excavating a ca.n.a.l as wide as that proposed--three hundred and twenty-seven feet.

When the Bitter Lake region was reached the work of excavation was no longer necessary, but much labor had to be expended in making an embankment for the better security of the ca.n.a.l.

At the southern end of the Bitter Lake region the work of cutting was again resumed as far as Suez, some thirty miles. This was, perhaps, as difficult a task as any that had to be accomplished. So difficult was it that the width of the ca.n.a.l was here reduced quite a little from that at first planned.

About the middle of March, 1869, the waters of the Mediterranean were successfully conducted into the Bitter Lake. Early in the fall of the same year Count de Lesseps had the well-earned satisfaction of making a steamer trip the entire length of the ca.n.a.l in about fifteen hours.

Thus had the skill and the energy of the French nation overcome the doubts and the objections of the English as to the practicability and possibility of so stupendous a piece of work.

It was a day of triumph when a formal notice of the public opening of the ca.n.a.l, throughout its entire length, was issued by Count de Lesseps in November, 1869. Several of the royal heads of Europe were invited to attend. The Emperor of Austria and the Empress Eugenie were among those present.

November 18, the imperial yacht _L'Aigle_, of France, with a fleet of forty vessels, made the pa.s.sage of the first part of the ca.n.a.l to Ismailia in about eight hours and a half. At Ismailia the fleet was met by four vessels recently arrived from the southern terminus of the ca.n.a.l at Suez. The whole fleet set sail for Suez November 19, reaching the Red Sea two days later.

Examination of the ca.n.a.l proved that the water was never less than twenty feet in its most shallow parts. The usual depth was not less than twenty-five feet. The ca.n.a.l is now open to navigation for vessels from all nations. The usual time of transit is fifteen hours. The total cost of this great achievement of mechanical skill was about sixty million dollars.

The opening of the ca.n.a.l had naturally a great influence upon Suez.

Formerly it was but an insignificant little town built upon a small corner of land near the northern arm of the Gulf of Suez. A railway connected it with Cairo some seventy-six miles distant. The town was walled on all sides except that facing the harbor. This harbor was rather an insignificant one, though it had a fairly good quay. Great improvements have been made. French and English houses and various offices and warehouses have been erected in different localities, which lend an air of thrift and enterprise to the town. The shops, or bazaars, have become much more pretentious, and furnish such supplies as clarified b.u.t.ter from Sinai, and fowls, grains, and vegetables from an Egyptian province.

The town, in spite of its improvements, is not attractive. There is little to please the eye in the wastes of burning sand that stretch out on every side. Rain is seen so seldom here as to seem almost a phenomenon. Sometimes intervals of more than three years elapse between the rainfalls.

It is rather interesting, in considering the changes that have taken place in the conditions of the earth's surface, to read that, in the opinion of many learned men, the Isthmus of Suez, though now only a dreary waste of sand, contained, at some remote time, the far-famed land of Goshen. Accounts of its fertility have been handed down to us from antiquity.

As we approach nearer the vicinity of the Nile we find, about fourteen miles north of Belbeys, the ruins of the ancient city Bubastis, the Pi-beseth of the Scriptures, the Tel Basta of modern times.

The name Bubastis is said to have been derived from that of the Egyptian G.o.ddess. It is related, that upon the flight of the G.o.ds into Egypt, Diana Bubastis changed herself into a cat. Since then these animals have been held sacred.

Historians give interesting accounts of festivals held at Bubastis in honor of the G.o.ddess. It was the custom to embalm all cats that died and send them to the sacred city to be buried.