Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/35

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 com-

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