From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE WONDERFUL DITCH
In one of those rhetorical outbursts to which even the subject of sanitary engineering had power to provoke him, Victor Hugo once passionately exclaimed, "A sewer is a misunderstanding!" So acutely did he feel the estrangement which has arisen between men and those fertilising agents which he treats for the most part as mere nuisances instead of entertaining them as friends and allies. The analogy may at first sight seem a fanciful one, but the isthmus has always appeared to me to resemble the drainpipe, as being a misunderstanding—not, indeed, on the part of man, who does his best to remove it, but on that of Nature. For it divorces things which seem obviously designed for union; it separates and alienates natural forces which are striving for co-operation, and which come so near to fulfilling what strikes one as their obvious destiny that one cannot but resent the narrow barrier which alone stands between them and success. The isthmus which keeps two oceans from mingling their waters in one common highway of nations is a purely gratuitous obstacle. This you cannot say of the strait which sunders continents; for straits are the boundary fences of states and races, and their existence makes for the individual security of peoples, and therefore for the peace of the world. Isolation is but a cheap price to pay for the blessing of even compulsory amity. If France, Italy, Germany, and Russia were suddenly converted by some cosmic catastrophe into four islands, the volume of international commerce might at first suffer some decrease, but how vast would be the compensation in internal wealth which would result from the release of Continental industry from its overwhelming military burdens! Seas, however, have no quarrel with each other, and the isthmuses which sunder them in both hemispheres, to the diversion of human intercourse by many thousand miles of ocean from its shortest routes, are really mere obstructions, and nothing more. Nature began it, at any rate in the Eastern hemisphere. Her original idea, according to the geologist, was to divide Asia from Africa by a waterway, and not by an isthmus, and, probably, for a little matter of a few million ages, the Red Sea flowed amicably onwards past what is now the head of the Gulf of Suez, and met the waters of the Mediterranean in a fraternal embrace.
Unfortunately, however, at some remote geological period she changed her mind, set her gales and currents to work to sow strife between the two seas, and brought a northward-flowing stream on the one side in the teeth of southward-blowing winds on the other. Neither would give way, and the inevitable result followed. The Red Sea began to throw up a sandbar; the Mediterranean, not to be behindhand, took to silting operations on its own account, and thus a barrier rose imperceptibly, grew and grew by infinitesimal degrees in height and breadth, was dried by the sun and blown by the desert winds into drifts, and piled up into dunes and sand-hills, until at last, in the creeping course of ages, it became the Isthmus of Suez—a closed door in the face of voyaging man seeking maritime transit between the Northern and Southern regions of the globe, and a door, moreover, which was to remain closed for all the innumerable aeons by which the date of those fossil conchylia that the Red Sea has left on the shores of Lake Timsah is divided from that day in March, 1869, when the long-separated waters met again. From the spondylus of the protozoic periods to the late M. de Lesseps is a big jump; and perhaps no breach between two ancient companions, which had lasted as long as this, was ever before so effectually healed.
Yet it is interesting to note how many and what persevering attempts have been made throughout all history to re-marry the divorced couple. In such a land of lakes and swamps and branching river arms as the Delta of the Nile it could hardly have been otherwise. Water communication, or the readiest facilities for establishing it, appeared everywhere except in the precise direction in which it was most wanted. Hence, from the time of the Pharaohs down to the Mohammedan conquest the dream of every active and capable Egyptian ruler has been to connect the two seas. The warrior kings of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, the Setis and the Rameseses, laid the foundation of that ancient fresh-water canal system, which was extended by conqueror after conqueror, by Persians and Ptolemies, by Cæsars and Caliphs, and which only finally fell into utter disrepair in the eighth century of the Christian era, to remain neglected for over a thousand years, till it was restored by the famous French engineer as an operation subsidiary to his great work. For centuries before and after Christ, a chain of fresh-water canals and lakes had rendered water transit practicable from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Nevertheless, the practicable was not often the practised. Trade in all ages of the world has been obstinate in its preferences, and neither Pharaohs nor Ptolemies nor Cæsars ever succeeded in turning it into the devious waterways which had been constructed for it. The Roman imports from the East reached the Queen city of the world by another route. Her Indian argosies touched at ports on the Western Coast of the Red Sea—at Koser, for instance, where the eastward-bending Nile touches its nearest point to those waters—and their unladen cargoes were conveyed by the great caravan route to Coptos, and re-embarked in boats on the great river for Alexandria, whence they were reshipped for their ultimate destination. The Mohammedan conquerors of Egypt tinkered, like their forerunners, with the ancient fresh-water canal system; and Amr Ibn-el-Asi used it for the transport of grain from his newly-founded Fostat—the Cairo of later times—to Suez, en route for Arabia; but under the Abbassides it fell into complete disuse. Venice, again, hankered, as might be expected, after a short cut through the isthmus to that gorgeous East which she "held in fee"; but she, too, followed her predecessors to decay without having done anything to realise her idea; while, unfortunately, the latest successor of Venice as the great trading State of the world allowed political apprehensions to chill her ancient spirit of commercial enterprise, and held aloof from that great project of re-uniting the two seas from which she has been so incomparably the greatest gainer, both in wealth and power.
To an Englishman who steams for the first time between the two-mile long breakwaters that protect the harbour of Port Said from the mud-laden current that would otherwise soon block its mouth, it is difficult to repress a pang of patriotic regret that England— the modern Rome—let slip the chance of adding this more than Roman work to the roll of her great engineering exploits. We, who have spanned continents and bridged oceans, should never have left it to any man of another race to cleave a way through the few score miles of isthmus which had so long obstructed the intercourse of the Eastern with the Western world. There is nothing very imposing, it is true, in that polgylot port—that unspeakable sentina gentium—that meeting-place of every race and every vice which plays janitrix of this Mediterranean gateway. But when a mansion is as spacious and as splendid as that which lies at the end of the passage, who cares about the private morals of the concierge? Say that Port Said is a sordid little Monte Carlo, doubled with a squalid little Corinth: say that it is a nest of silver hells and sailors' bagnios, and what matters? In a few hours we shall have discharged our Egyptian consignments, and taken our India-bound cargo, and away we shall have steamed southward into that curious maritime ditch that has been dug in the desert to correct the "second thoughts" of Nature ill-inspired, and to reconstitute the conditions of an infinitely distant geological past.
And what a wonderful ditch it is! More wonderful, perhaps, than ever now that, thanks to the ingenuities of modern science, it is navigable by night as well as by day. Before the age of electricity, the on-coming of darkness meant the arrest of navigation, and the canal after nightfall was tenanted only by moored and motionless ships. But now, with the dazzling rays of the search-light streaming from our bows, and throwing its broad, fan-shaped patch of radiance on the dark waters ahead of us, we can steam steadily on. Five miles an hour is not exactly what you would call good running for a large steamer, but it is better than absolute rest—for those, at least, who want to reach their journey's end; and if you were only sure of being able to keep it up you would be in a position to make a fairly accurate guess at the time at which you will reach your destination at Ismailia. This, however, is just what you cannot do; and it is the impossibility of doing it that lends so "sporting" an interest to the Egypt-bound travellers' passage through the Canal. Facts on board ship are always hard to come by, and the earnest seeker after truth as regards the vessel's movements, dates of arrival, hours of departure, and so forth, is usually led to the conclusion that the object of his search is to be found nowhere but in the bosom of the captain—if there; a circumstance, however, which does not in any degree check the confident circulation of statements varying through every degree of inaccuracy on the authority of the more "knowing" among the passengers. But this is a case in which not even the experienced and obliging commander of the P. and O. steamship Sumatra can give us any precise information as to when we shall find ourselves at the goal of our voyage. It will not be before the small hours of the morning, of that we may assure ourselves; but exactly how small they will be he cannot say. A new day will have come to the birth before we arrive, so much is certain; but the age which the new-born babe will have attained on our arrival cannot be precisely fixed. It may be a miserable, purblind, chilly infant of two or three, or a stouter, healthier brat of five, or, best of all, a rosy, sun-warmed child of eight. All depends on our luck, and our orders from the stations on the bank.
"Do you see that coloured light?" said the captain, pointing to a signal some way ahead of us. "That means that ships from the North are to hold on their course, and ships from the South to 'tie up.' We shall pass one in a few minutes. Do you see her search-light?"
At this distance it looks a mere mass of silver haze; but it grows sharper and clearer as we approach, and in a little while we can make out the dim outline of the great ship that carries it. Higher and higher she seems to rise as we approach, and her squat funnels begin to shape themselves in the luminous mist. Another minute or two and we are alongside; and, though the Sumatra is assuredly no cock-boat, the ship we are passing seems to tower above us, a huge black wall with motionless figures gazing at us over its battlements. Inquisitive passengers hail these apparitions from our side with inquiries as to name and nationality of the vessel, but they vouchsafe no reply. Again and again the question is repeated, but still no answer. This is absurd, since everybody understands the English language; it even seems uncanny. Not a sound comes from them, not a limb stirs, not a footfall is heard on her decks as we glide past this looming bastion, and exchange its utter blackness for the grey surface of the canal bank. For all that appears she might be the phantom ship that the Ancient Mariner saw, the ship of "the nightmare Death-in-Life, that thicks men's blood with cold." As a matter of fact, she is a French transport returning with troops from Madagascar.
If she looked spectral in the weird half-light around us, it is only because every other object which we are passing has a phantasmal air. The patch of illuminated water before our bows is as bright as day; but the buoys which lie outside this luminous arc slip past us like a grey procession of ghosts, the banks are as shadowy as the shores of Styx itself, and the desert stretches away on either side vast and silent, like the "empty kingdoms of Dis." It would scarcely surprise one to see Charon pulling across our wake with a boatload of strengthless shades. The ferryman and his freight would hardly seem more unearthly than the whole scene. As we creep thus leisurely onward the sound of our engines has become little more than an audible murmur. No faintest echo of man or animal reaches us from either shore. The silence is unbroken save by the occasional clang of the electric signal bell from the bridge and the sleepy lapping of the water about our bows. The endless train of buoys filing dimly past us on the waters, the canal banks drifting by in grey monotony, begin at last to affect the senses like the reiterated cadence of a song. They lull your brain by degrees, especially at midnight, into a sort of half-waking slumber, in which you seem to be sailing dream-like through a world of dreams, till at last you might almost believe that the mysterious channel itself which you are navigating is still the vision that it was to the Pharaoh of 3000 years ago, and to Persian and to Greek, to Roman and to Arab since his day, and that M. Ferdinand de Lesseps never appeared among the sons of men to build up a reputation in one isthmus and to wreck it in another.
But it is our turn to "tie up" and give the northward-bound ships a chance, and to tie up may mean a wait of any length from half an hour to thrice that time. With so much more of the canal still to be traversed before we reach our destination a tying up of the steamer justifies the turning in of the passenger. We have still four or five good hours before us ere we bring to in Lake Timsah, and the steam tender bears us across its waters in the grey of the morning towards "the haven where we would be."