IN THE EAST INDIES. 37 
P.& O.8. 8. Moldavia, Saturday, October 27, 1906. 
Dear Mother : 
I wish you eculd be with us and see all the won- 
derful sights we have seen. Port Said is very interest- 
ing and very dirty. I wrote Sal about it. The canal 
is great and we were sorry to leave it. It is eighty odd 
miles long, three hundred feet wide and thirty feet 
deep in the middle. Along some of the banks there 
is masonry coping and in time the whole canal will 
have it. The suction from any boat is considerable, 
but from a boat of this size it is tremendous; where 
there is no coping of course great quantities of sand 
are sucked into the canal. Every few miles there is a 
gare, or station, and a siding with signal posts, by 
which the traffic is regulated according to the block 
system, by hoisting black balls and at night by electric 
lights. About every hundred feet on both banks of 
the canal there are white posts to tie up to; as home- 
ward bound vessels have the right of way we tied 
up eleven times before we got to Suez on the Red sea. 
The speed limit is six miles an hour and it took us 
twenty-one hours. But we were sorry when it was 
over, as it was so interesting and different from any- 
thing we had ever seen before, although as far as trop- 
ical vegetation is concerned we passed almost none, as 
the whole length on both sides is nothing but flat, 
glaring, sandy desert. At the end of each section of 
the canal, however, there are station houses, with ar- 
tesian wells, and here everything looks green and 
flourishing and dates and bananas grow well. Near 
Suez a fresh water canal comes in from Cairo and 
aiong this the country looked very flourishing. The 
mud huts the Arabs live in right out in the desert are 
