We noticed that the Egyptian laborers at work with the wheelbarrows (instead of the baskets formerly used by them) on the enlargement of the canal, were under French contractors, for the most part. The men are paid from a franc to a franc and a quarter per day; but they told us that it was very difficult to get laborers, so many men being drafted for the army.
At dark we come in sight of the Bitter Lakes, through which the canal is dredged; we can see vessels of various sorts and steamers moving across them in one line; and we see nothing more until we reach Suez. The train stops “at nowhere,” in the sand, outside the town. It is the only train of the day, but there are neither carriages nor donkeys in waiting. There is an air about the station of not caring whether anyone comes or not. We walk a mile to the hotel, which stands close to the sea, with nothing but a person's good sense to prevent his walking off the platform into the water. In the night the water looked like the sand, and it was only by accident that we did not step off into it; however, it turned out to be only a couple of feet deep.
The hotel, which I suppose is rather Indian than Egyptian, is built round a pleasant court; corridors and latticed doors are suggestive of hot nights; the servants and waiters are all Hindoos; we have come suddenly in contact with another type of Oriental life.
Coming down from Ismailia, a friend who was with us had no ticket. It was a case beyond the conductor's experience; he utterly refused backsheesh and he insisted on having a ticket. At last he accepted ten francs and went away. Looking in the official guide we found that the fare was nine francs and a quarter. The conductor, thinking he had opened a guileless source of supply, soon returned and demanded two francs more. My friend countermined him by asking the return of the seventy-five centimes overpaid. An amusing pantomime ensued. At length the conductor lowered his demand to one franc, and, not getting that, he begged for backsheesh. I was sorry to have my high ideal of a railway-conductor, formed in America, lowered in this manner.
We are impatient above all things for a sight of the Red Sea. But in the brilliant starlight, all that appears is smooth water and a soft picture of vessels at anchor or aground looming up in the night. Suez, seen by early daylight, is a scattered city of some ten thousand inhabitants, too modern and too cheap in its buildings to be interesting. There is only a little section of it, where we find native bazaars, twisting streets, overhanging balconies, and latticed windows. It lies on a sand peninsula, and the sand-drifts close all about it, ready to lick it up, if the canal of fresh water should fail.
The only elevation near is a large mound, which may be the site of the fort of ancient Clysma, or Gholzim as it was afterwards called—the city believed to be the predecessor of Suez. Upon this mound an American has built, and presented to the Khedive, a sort of châlet of wood—the whole transported from America ready-made, one of those white, painfully unpicturesque things with two little gables at the end, for which our country is justly distinguished. Cheap. But then it is of wood, and wood is one of the dearest things in Egypt. I only hope the fashion of it may not spread in this land of grace.
It was a delightful morning, the wind west and fresh. From this hillock we commanded one of the most interesting prospects in the world. We looked over the whole desert-flat on which lies the little town, and which is pierced by an arm of the Gulf that narrows into the Suez canal; we looked upon two miles of curved causeway which runs down to the docks and the anchoring place of the steam-vessels—there cluster the dry-docks, the dredges, the canal-offices, and just beyond the shipping lay; in the distance we saw the Red Sea, like a long lake, deep-green or deep-blue, according to the light, and very sparkling; to the right was the reddish limestone range called Gebel Attâka—a continuation of the Mokattam; on the left there was a great sweep of desert, and far off—one hundred and twenty miles as the crow flies—the broken Sinai range of mountains, in which we tried to believe we could distinguish the sacred peak itself.
I asked an intelligent railway official, a Moslem, who acted as guide that morning, “What is the local opinion as to the place where the Children of Israel crossed over?”
“The French,” he replied, “are trying to make it out that it was at Chaloof, about twenty miles above here, where there is little water. But we think it was at a point twenty miles below here; we must put it there, or there wouldn't be any miracle. You see that point, away to the right? That's the spot. There is a wady comes down the side.”
“But where do the Christians think the crossing was?”