Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century

difficulty, and at a time when a few months only could elapse before the advertised day of the opening. He attacked the sunken rock with gunpowder. A large raft, or floor, supported on barges, was moored over the sunken rock, and from this men, armed with long poles shod with steel, drilled numerous holes, into which charges of gunpowder were placed, and fired in the usual manner by the electric battery. This temporary obstruction occurred opposite to the landing place at Sérápeum. Fig. 132.—The Viceroy of Egypt cutting the last embankment of the Reservoir of the Plain of Suez, to unite the two seas—the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Passing by Sérápeum, the traveller arrives at a vast expanse of water called the “Bitter Lakes,” because the dry sandy hollow formerly contained a marsh, or mere, of very brackish water. The possibility of keeping this great area filled with sea water had been denied by the opponents of the canal, who said the water would sink into the sand or be evaporated by the intense heat of the sun; but none of these prognostications have been verified, and it is now a great inland sea, far surpassing Lake Timsah, being 25 miles long and from six to seven miles wide. The only difficulty in filling this enormous natural basin arose from the rapidity and force with which the waters flowed in. This was done when the water at Suez was at low tide, and then subsequently the Red Sea was allowed to flow in. Though the expanse of water in the Bitter Lakes is great enough, the available channel is still narrow. But the steamers can proceed at full speed, as here there are no banks to be washed away. Since the two seas have joined their waters, a strong current has set in from south to north, but there is no eddy or fall at the place where the 262waters meet. The tide runs up the canal with great force, and there is a difference of six or seven feet between high and low water: but the tide does not extend beyond the Bitter Lakes, where it is gradually diffused and lost. The colour of the current of water from Suez is said to be green, whilst that portion fed by the Mediterranean is blue. Since the Bitter Lakes have been filled the mean temperature of the districts on the banks has fallen 5° Centigrade. It is also stated that, although the canal swarms with sea fish they keep to their respective ends of the canal, as if the Mediterranean fish would not consort with those of the Red Sea, or, rather, make themselves at home in strange waters. There is also, perhaps, another cause, and that is the very bitter nature of the water at the northern end of the Bitter Lakes, which acts as a natural barrier, through which the fish may decline to pass. The bed of the Bitter Lakes is the only portion of the canal’s course in which it was not necessary to make a cutting. Buoys are laid down to mark the best channel, but such is the width and depth of the water that vessels need not exactly keep within them. Quitting the Bitter Lakes we again enter the canal proper. In order to reach the vast docks which the Suez Canal Company has constructed on the western coast of the Red Sea, the canal is now quitted, and the vessel crosses the neck of the Red Sea. The Cairo and Alexandria Railway has been extended two miles, and is carried through the sea on an embankment, which lands the train close to the docks and quays of the canal, so that passengers by the overland route are able to embark from the train on board the steamer, and thus escape the troublesome transhipment of themselves and luggage.