Abstract
THE Canal has been opened. The flotilla, with its noble, royal, imperial, and scientific freight, has progressed along the new-made way from sea to sea. From Port Saïd, that new town between the sea and the wilderness, with its ten thousand inhabitants, and acres of workshops and building-yards, and busy steam-engines, the naval train floated through sandy wastes, across lakes of sludge and lakes of water filled from the Salt Sea; past levels where a few palm-trees adorn the scorched landscape; past hill-slopes on which the tamarisk waves its thready arms; past swamps where flocks of flamingoes, pelicans, and spoonbills, disturbed by the unwonted spectacle, sent up discordant cries; through deep excavations of hard sand or rock; across the low flat of the Suez lagoons, where Biblical topographers have searched for the track of the children of Israel; and so to the “red” waters of the great Gulf of Arabia. The flotilla has done its work: the Canal has been opened; and the distance by water to India is now 8,000 miles, instead of the 15,000 miles by the old route round the Cape of Good Hope.
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The Isthmian Way to India . Nature 1, 110–112 (1869). https://doi.org/10.1038/001110a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/001110a0