"Like yourself, it is provided with two arms, but it does not shoot with them," replied the captain. "On our left are the ruins of Arsinoe, which was an ancient port, once called Crocodilopolis; and, by the way, Lake Timsah was once Crocodile Lake, and doubtless the saurians formerly sported in its waters."
"About Arsinoe?" suggested the professor.
"Probably you know more about it than I do, Professor."
"I know little except that it was a commercial city of Egypt, built by Ptolemy II. The name is that of several females distinguished in one way or another in the ancient world, and the word is usually written with a diæresis over the final e, so that it is pronounced as though it were written Arsinoey. The city thrived for a time, and was the emporium of eastern Egypt; but the perils of the navigation in the north of the Red Sea diverted the trade into other channels, and the place went to decay. It was named by Ptolemy after his sister, who was married at sixteen to the aged king of Thrace. There is a bloody story connected with her life, which I will not repeat; but in the end she fled to the protection of her brother in Egypt, and after the fashion of that age and country, he made her his wife."
"You have not been in Asia any of you yet, or even as near that continent before as you are at this moment," continued the commander, as the ship passed out of the canal into the gulf.
"I thought we had been in Asia," interposed Mrs. Belgrave.
"Certainly we have," added half a dozen others.
"Isn't Scutari in Asia, Captain?" asked the lady.
"To be sure it is, and we all went over there from Constantinople," replied the commander. "I had forgotten that, and you are not so innocent as I began to make it appear. But you have Asia on one side and Europe on the other."
"Well, we had that on the Bosporus, when we made that trip to the Black Sea in the Maud," added the lady, who seemed to be pleased because she had caught the captain in a blunder.