Accordingly, on the 18th, a little before twelve o’clock, a very fresh and favourable breeze came from the N. W. and we pointed our prow directly, as we thought, upon Alexandria.
The coast of Egypt is exceedingly low, and, if the weather is not clear, you often are close in with the land before you discover it.
A strong current sets constantly to the eastward; and the way the masters of vessels pretend to know their approach to the coast is by a black mud, which they find upon the plummet[55] at the end of their sounding-line, about seven leagues distant from land.
Our master pretended at midnight he had found that black sand, and therefore, although the wind was very fair, he chose to lie to, till morning, as thinking himself near the coast; although his reckoning, as he said, did not agree with what he inferred from his soundings.
As I was exceedingly vexed at being so disappointed of making the best of our favourable wind, I rectified my quadrant, and found by the passages of two stars over the meridian, that we were in lat. 32° 1´ 45´´, or seventeen leagues distant from Alexandria, instead of seven, and that by difference of our latitude only.
From this I inferred that part of the assertion, that it is the mud of the Nile which is supposed to shew seamen their approach to Egypt, is mere imagination; seeing that the point where we then were was really part of the sea opposite to the desert of Barca, and had no communication whatever with the Nile.
On the contrary, the Etesian winds blowing all Summer upon that coast, from the westward of north, and a current setting constantly to the eastward, it is impossible that any part of the mud of the Nile can go so high to the windward of any of the mouths of that river.
It is well known, that the action of these winds, and the constancy of that current, has thrown a great quantity of mud, gravel, and sand, into all the ports on the coast of Syria.
All vestiges of old Tyre are defaced; the ports of Sidon, [56]Berout, Tripoli, and [57]Latikea, are all filled up by the accretion of sand; and, not many days before my leaving Sidon, Mr de Clerambaut, consul of France, shewed me the pavements of the old city of Sidon, 7½ feet lower than the ground upon which the present city stands, and considerably farther back in the gardens nearer to Mount Libanus.
This every one in the country knows is the effect of that easterly current setting upon the coast, which, as it acts perpendicularly to the course of the Nile when discharging itself, at all or any of its mouths, into the Mediterranean, must hurry what it is charged with on towards the coast of Syria, and hinder it from settling opposite to, or making those additions to the land of Egypt, which [58]Herodotus has vainly supposed.