"The tonnage of the Suez is not one-third as great as that of the Sault
Ste. Marie Canal in the Great Lakes, but its importance to the commerce
of the world is greater than that of any other passageway of the seas.
Wherever there is a strait or a narrow passage through which commerce
may go, there is sure to be a British flag flying, a British band
playing, and a red-coated Tommy Atkins strutting about with a swagger
stick. Suez is not an exception.
"Fourteen centuries before Christ, nearly 3,500 years ago, the Pharaoh
Setee I., father of Rameses the Great, cut a canal fifty-seven miles
long from a branch of the Nile delta to the bitter lakes, which are now
part of the Suez Canal and which were then the northern extremity of
the Gulf of Suez. That connected the Mediterranean with the Red Sea,
and Egypt waxed great. But the nation decayed, and the sands of the
desert filled up the ditch. Eight hundred years later the Pharaoh
Necho undertook to dig the canal. More than a hundred thousand lives
were sacrificed to the project, but it was abandoned when a priest
predicted that its completion would cause Egypt to fall into the hands
of a foreign usurper. A hundred years after Necho, the Persian Darius
took up the work on the abandoned canal, but his engineers told him
that its completion would cause a deluge, and he desisted. About three
hundred years before Christ was born, Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed
a lock-and-dam canal through which ships made the journey from one of
the mouths of the Nile to the site of modern Suez. Continued wars
interrupted commerce, and the locks and dams fell into decay, so that
Cleopatra's navy was unable to escape to the Red Sea by canal. The
Roman engineers later patched up the canal so that their galleys made
their way from sea to sea; but when the Arabs came in A.D. 700 they
found it choked up. Amrou, the Arab, cleared it out, but it was soon
permitted to fill up again, and not until the great Napoleon reached
Egypt was the canal project again considered. Napoleon abandoned the
idea only because his engineers assured him that the level of the
Mediterranean was thirty feet below that of the Red Sea. He then
considered a lock-and-dam canal, but he evacuated Egypt before anything
came of it. Of course, all those ancient canals were very narrow and
shallow, and no boat now dignified with the business of carrying cargo
for profit could have entered any one of them."