"Amongst other on dits the papers report that Sir Garnet Wolseley, before leaving London and Richmond, not only determined mid-September as the term of the campaign, but also, placing his finger upon Tel el-Kebír, predicted that the decisive action would be fought there. Is this possible? The rebels intended their field-works to be a simple outpost, a first line of trenches dug in the desert; the main defence was to be near Zagázíg, where the hoe'd and irrigated ground, cut by a network of small canals, would have been ugly to cross, as that about Kafr Dawár. But with an inconsequence, which denoted all their actions, Arábi and his Arábists wholly neglected to lay out a second line. Thus the battle was fought at the outer and provisional trenches, on open ground, with gentle rises and falls, where half-disciplined and unofficered men had no chance against regular troops, and the admirable arrangements of their General.
"Messrs. Cook, who took charge of the Commander-in-Chief and the head-quarter staff on their homeward journey—right sensibly they ignored those twin pests, the Courier and the Dragoman—and who will personally conduct the future Princes of the West to the 'Morning-Land,' soon advertised a 'trip to Tel el-Kebír,' where a large Dahabíyeh-barge, moored in the Sweetwater Canal, acted hotel. Here sundry sight-seers 'detrain,' each provided with Major Ardagh's 'lithographic sketch showing the attack.' They may find donkeys, but they prefer a four miles' trudge, over sand and gravel, in the November sun, hotter than an August semi-sun in England, to the British right, where the Highlanders attacked. The battle-field was long unpleasant; the dead might have been buried deeper; and the Bedawi took to 'resurrecting' the Egyptians for loot. Spoils presently disappeared and mementoes became rare, chiefly confined to water-bottles and old hats, bundles of cartridges, and fragments of weapons and missiles.
"A shaky stretch of twenty-six miles places us at ill-fated Ismailíyeh. When I first saw the pretty station in 1869, it boasted a delicious climate, combining the perfume of flowers and trees with the ozone and the 'champagne air' of the Desert. In 1878 the Ismailíyeh Canal, carrying Nile-water which sank into the loose gravelly ground, had bred dangerous malaria-fevers; and now the place is pestilential, hardly inhabitable. Worse still, no one knows what manner of sanitation it requires.
"Here the 'great engineer,' as our scribes will style M. F. de Lesseps, a retired Consul, innocent of all engineering but the amateur's, did us, unconsciously and right unwillingly, the best of good turns. His open patronizing of the arch-rebel, his phrasing, his posing, and his promises of immunity from attack, kept the Canal open, although all arrangements had been made for closing it. This is not to be done by shovelling in earth and sand, which can be shovelled out almost as fast. The best way is to lash together two or three ships or dredgers and simply to scuttle them: the obstruction would require blowing up, and even dynamite wastes valuable time. During future troubles merchant-craft should be convoyed with all precaution up and down the line, each convoy headed and followed by a gunboat. But the real want is a second waterway running parallel with the present. The cost need hardly exceed one-third of the first; and the lessons of the past will make the work easy as well as economical. This subject would require an article for itself: it has already appeared before the public, rather unpleasantly, and it will appear again. The pompous claim to monopoly of the Isthmus, the preposterous demands for millions, and the general tone of the Gallic chanticleers, followed by a loud gobbling from the bubbly-jock of Stamboul, rather amused than offended England. But it is no laughing matter, and some measure is the more necessary as the days of the Euphrates Valley Railway are either done or have not yet dawned. With the Russian at Kars, ready to march ten thousand men down south, we should be building a road for the especial benefit of the invader. Ten years ago it would have served to check the enemy; now it can only facilitate his attack. Not that we have any cause for alarm in the final result, whatever the Russophobe may think or say. Chinese armies, led by English officers, will occupy Moscow before the Muscovite reaches Calcutta.
"From Ismailíyeh we enter the wilderness; we are already in Arabia Deserta. The features are familiar, but they are ever fresh and they never pall. On our left, beyond the bush-green, rushy line of the rigolle, lies the chain of indigo-coloured lakelets, Timsah and the 'Waters of Marah;' and ships upraised by refraction course over the dry land. To our right rise the cliffy prolongations of Cairo's Jebel Mukattam, fading away into the distance-dwarfened mounds of Jebel Atákah and Abu Diráj beyond Suez. The broken plain around us, uniformly tawny as a lion's fell, dons ethereal tints as day is about to die, and borrows from the evening skies every colour of the rainbow. It has none of the charms of earthly landscape, grassy hill and wooded dale and park-like plain. All its beauties are reflected from the air and are assimilated till they become its own. No rose can be rosier than its blush-tints; no verdure delicater than its green glazing, the blend of chrome with lilac and cobalt; no yellow more golden than its foreground, no Tyrian purple more gorgeous than its middle distances; no azure more soothing and gracious than what clothes its horizon; no shift of scenery more pronounced than its rippling of alternate light and shade, flushing and paling under the acuter angles of the slanting sun-rays. Presently the giant grey shadow, or wall of night, rises slowly in the east; the blazonry of evening waxes faint and wan in the west, and without a shade of 'gloaming;' for here night comes on with a single stride, earth looks old and pallid and cold—alt, kalt und ungestalt—the spectre of her former self. Then follows the final transformation scene. The mysterious Zodiacal light, a pyramid whose base is the region of the setting sun, and whose apex towers towards the zenith, stands distinctly out of the black-blue velvety darkness, made visible by the golden lamps of star, planet, and constellation.
'—Contentez-vous mes yeux
Vous ne verrez jamais chose plus belle!'
"Poor Suez is the sole exception to the general rule of gaiety and merry-making in Egypt. She is actually in the throes of house-changing. She knows that the flitting must be done, but she has no heart to do it. This will be her third remove: even as Heroöpolis on the Bitter Lakes shifted to Arsinoë and Arsinoë migrated to Suez, so Suez must transfer herself to the New Docks—Waghorntown. She must rebuild herself, hotel and inns, Consulates and offices, agencies and counting-houses, leaving the-present tenement to Egyptian officials and native population. The causeway run out to the New Harbour, has so swallowed the bays on either side of it, like the Alexandrian Heptastadium, that even light-draft steamers find shoal water, and in a few years there will be dry ground where the wave still rolls. Medieval Suez, like Sandwich, will presently become an inland town.
"And yet another change for the worse awaits her. We shall in a few years land from Malta at Gurnah, the famous old Cyrene south-east of the island which did not shelter St. Paul. Lying near the north-eastern shore of the Sidra Gulf (Syrtis Major), with a safe port distant ten miles, it was famous in Roman days as the Capital of the Cyreniaca, one of the granaries of the Empire; and the splendour of its ruins shows a high degree of civilization. Through this ancient land, Pentapolis, where there are no mechanical difficulties, a railroad will carry us to Alexandria. We shall then run up viâ Cairo to Keneh, turn eastward, and embark at El-Kusayr (Cosseir). This line, proposed about a decade ago, is sure to be built. It will spare us the mortification of the disagreeable and dangerous Suez-gulf, which is ever too stormy or too still; moreover, it will be a gain of three clear days, and in this section of the nineteenth century the shortest line surely wins. I say nothing about the proposed 'Jordan Canal,' which proposes to deluge half the 'Holy Land,' beyond an expression of admiration that men in their senses can be induced to listen to it. The next move will be for the Man in the Moon to apply for a railway.
"And Suez has been for some time en petite santé! She has suffered from Dengué fever, which she calls Abú rukab, or 'Father of Knees,' because those articulations make themselves prominently felt. The complaint, unpleasant though not perilous, used to rage in Syrian Bayrút, and of late years Cairo suffered from it severely. The locally learned attribute its origin to impure drinking-water; if so, Suez has to blame herself for not cleaning her Canal. Perhaps her constitutional delicacy has prevented, during the Rebellion, her normal display of uproarious temper. All 'old Egyptians' were notably deceived in their forecasts about Suez as about Alexandria. The so-called National Movement never made head here, and yet with certain remarkable exceptions Englishmen and Europeans showed the normal poltroonery. It moves laughter to hear of men armed to the teeth sneaking home at night to find all the world peacefully asleep. It would be invidious to mention the names of those who manfully stood their ground, and who won the respect of the natives whilst the runaways fell into the utmost contempt. But it is to be hoped that their services in keeping the peace will be duly recognized by either Government.
"Before Suez can settle down in her fourth home she has hard work to do. The apparently solid masonry of the north and south basins in the French Docks is being washed away by mètres: the walls resemble the bombarded Alexandrian Forts; and here we have another fine study of modern ruins compared with the ancient which were built with the express purpose of defying Time. The only remedy will be to fill up both areas and fit them for building-ground. There is already space enough to begin with; but Suez No. 4 must have room to grow. The Harbour of the future will be formed, like Port Saíd, by the broad space between the Canal piers, where dredging and deepening are the only things needful. It is to be hoped that modern Suez will be laid out on a regular plan and with due attention to drainage. Moria Pasha should look to this.