"Thirty-two, eighteen," said the bulky lawyer.
"Are there any whales in the lake?" asked Felix.
"You can fish for them, my lad; but the particular Waleses of whom I spoke were not 'in it,'" continued the captain. "These Wales did not spout, though they probably said something; but they let in the water instead of blowing it out, as respectable whales do at sea. The waters of the two seas came together, and notwithstanding the joyousness of the occasion, the meeting was not altogether amiable and pleasant at first. Each representative of the different bodies seemed to pitch into the other, and the onslaught created a great commotion for a time. If they were ever united before in the distant past, they appeared to have forgotten all about it.
"The war was short and decisive, and the waters soon settled down into a peaceful condition, as you will find them to-day. They have apparently shaken hands, and accepted the task of promoting the commerce of the world. But here we come to the great basin. The lake is about six miles wide. Here is the lighthouse, and there is another at the other end of it, each of them sixty-five feet high."
The shores of the lake are flat and sandy, and the water is of a bluish green hue. There is a well-defined channel through it. As there is no longer any danger of washing the banks of the canal, steamers increase their speed, and the Guardian-Mother made the next twenty miles in less than two hours. As the captain had promised, it was a change of scene, and it was very agreeable to the party. In the distance could be seen the Geneffeh range of hills, which were a relief in the landscape from the desert. In them are rich quarries of marble and limestone which are profitably worked.
The passage through the canal had become monotonous to the travellers after they had passed through the lakes, for it was a desert on both sides. Shortly after, the water-way was cut through sandstone, and after that the soil was clay, or a mixture of it with lime; but the last part of the course was through depths of sand again. The tide on the Red Sea rises from five to seven feet, and its flow extends about four miles up the canal.
"Looking ahead, you can see an expanse of water, which means that we are coming to the end of our canal travel," said the commander. "I suppose no one will be sorry for it; for we have had all our social arrangements as usual, and there has been something to see and much to learn all the way."
"It has not been at all like my canal travel at home," added Uncle Moses, who was the oldest person on board of the ship by one month, by which time Dr. Hawkes was his junior, and they were only fifty-four. "I went from Syracuse to Oswego by a canal boat when I was a young man. The trip was in the night, and I slept on a swinging shelf, held up by ropes; and we were bumping much of the time in the locks so that I did not sleep so well as I did last night. But what water have we ahead, Captain?"
"It is an arm of the Gulf of Suez, which is itself one of the two great arms of the Red Sea."
"It appears to be well armed," said Uncle Moses, who could be guilty of a pun on extreme provocation.