Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/37

tian 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