My Winter on the Nile / Eighteenth Edition

by Charles Dudley Warner

CHAPTER XXXVI.—BY THE RED SEA.

A GENTLEMAN started from Cairo a few days before us, with the avowed purpose of following in the track of the Children of Israel and viewing the exact point where they crossed the Red Sea. I have no doubt that he was successful. So many routes have been laid out for the Children across the Isthmus, that one can scarcely fail to fall into one of them. Our purpose was merely to see Suez and the famous Sea, and the great canal of M. Lesseps; not doubting, however, that when we looked over the ground we should decide where the Exodus must have taken place.

The old direct railway to Suez is abandoned; the present route is by Zagazeeg and Ismailia—a tedious journey, requiring a day. The ride is wearisome, for the country is flat and presents nothing new to one familiar with Egyptian landscapes. The first part of the journey is, however, enlivened by the company of the canal of Fresh Water, and by the bright verdure of the plain which the canal produces. And this luxuriant vegetation continues until you come to the still unreclaimed desert of the Land of Goshen. Now that water can be supplied it only needs people to make this Land as fat as it was in the days of the Israelites.

Some twenty miles from Cairo we pass near the so-called Mound of the Jew, believed to be the ruins of the city of Orion and the temple built by the high priest Onias in the reign of Ptolemy Philometer and Cleopatra, as described by Josephus. The temple was after the style of that at Jerusalem. This Jewish settlement was made upon old Egyptian ruins; in 1870 the remains of a splendid temple of the time of Rameses II. were laid open. The special interest to Biblical scholars of this Jewish colony here, which multiplied itself and spread over considerable territory, is that its establishment fulfilled a prophesy of Isaiah (xix, 19, etc.); and Onias urged this prophesy, in his letter to the Ptolemy, asking permission to purge the remains of the heathen temple in the name of Heliopolis and to erect there a temple to Almighty God. Ptolemy and Cleopatra replied that they wondered Onias should desire to build a temple in a place so unclean and so full of sacred animals, but since Isaiah foretold it, he had leave to do so. We saw nothing of this ancient and once flourishing seat of Jewish enterprise, save some sharp mounds in the distance.

Nor did we see more of the more famous city of Bubastis, where was the temple to Pasht, the cat or lioness-headed deity (whom Herodotus called Diana), the avenger of crimes. According to Herodotus, all the cats of Egypt were embalmed and buried in Bubastis. This city was the residence of the Pharaoh Sheshonk I. (the Shishak of the Bible) who sacked Jerusalem, and it was at that time the capital of Egypt. It was from here, on the Bubastic (or Pelusiac) branch of the Nile, that the ancient canal was dug to connect with the Heroôpolite Gulf (now the Bitter Lakes), the northernmost arm of the Red Sea at that date; and the city was then, by that fresh-water canal, on the water-way between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. But before the Christian era the Red Sea had retired to about its present limit (the Bitter Lakes being cut off from it), and the Bubastic branch of the Nile was nearly dried up. Bubastis and all this region are now fed by the canal which leaves the Nile at Cairo and runs to Ismailia, and thence to Suez. It is a startling thought that all this portion of the Delta, east, and south, and the Isthmus depend for life upon the keeper of the gate of the canal at Cairo. If we were to leave the train here and stumble about in the mounds of Bubastis, we should find only fragments of walls, blocks of granite, and a few sculptures.

At the Zagazeeg station, where there is a junction with the Alexandria and Cairo main line, we wait some time, and find very pleasant the garden and the picturesque refreshment-house in which our minds are suddenly diverted from ancient Egypt by a large display of East Indian and Japanese curiosities on sale.

From this we follow, substantially, the route of the canal, running by villages and fertile districts, and again on the desert's edge. We come upon no traces of the Israelites until we reach Masamah, which is supposed to be the site of Rameses, one of the treasure-cities mentioned in the Bible, and the probable starting-point of the Jews in their flight. This is about the center of the Land of Goshen, and Rameses may have been the chief city of the district.

If I knew exactly the route the Israelites took, I should not dare to disclose it; for this has become, I do not know why, a tender subject. But it seems to me that if the Jews were assembled here from the Delta for a start, a very natural way of exit would have been down the Wadee to the head of the Heroopolite Gulf, the route of the present and the ancient canal. And if it should be ascertained beyond a doubt that Sethi I. built as well as planned such a canal, the argument of probability would be greatly strengthened that Moses led his vast host along the canal. Any dragoman to-day, desiring to cross the Isthmus and be beyond pursuit as soon as possible, supposing the condition of the country now as it was at the time of the Exodus, would strike for the shortest line. And it is reasonable to suppose that Moses would lead his charge to a point where the crossing of the sea, or one of its arms, was more feasible than it is anywhere below Suez; unless we are to start with the supposition that Moses expected a miracle, and led the Jews to a spot where, apparently, escape for them was hopeless if the Egyptian pursued. It is believed that at the time of the Exodus there was a communication between the Red Sea and the Bitter Lakes—formerly called Heroopolite Gulf—which it was the effort of many rulers to keep open by a canal. Very anciently, it is evident, the Red Sea extended to and included these lakes; and it is not improbable that, in the time of Moses, the water was, by certain winds, forced up to the north into these lakes: and again, that, crossings could easily be made, the wind being favorable, at several points between what is now Suez and the head of the Bitter Lakes. Many scholars make Cha-loof, about twelve miles above Suez the point of passage.

We only touch the outskirts of Ismailia in going on to Suez. Below, we pass the extensive plantation and garden of the Khedive, in which he has over fifty thousand young trees in a nursery. This spot would be absolute desert but for the Nile-water let in upon it. All day our astonishment has increased at the irrigation projects of the Viceroy, and his herculean efforts to reclaim a vast land of desert; the enlarging of the Sweet-Water Canal, and the gigantic experiments in arboriculture and agriculture.