The Suez Canal and Red Sea. 249 



last year in a Surrey meadow knee-deep in grass and flowers, 

 and having, by the gift of a few centimes, persuaded a black- 

 eyed young Arabling to fetch a small heap of cockles, I 

 proceeded to angle from the jetty, in the company of a 

 couple of donkey boys whose love of sport tempted them to 

 neglect their duties and to come in for as neat a drubbing, 

 when detected, as. any Old World pedagogue would desire. 

 The young rascals, I regret to say, caught nothing but their 

 whacking, while there seemed to be no limit to the number 

 of six-inch fry falling to my share. They were either mullet 

 or a charmingly tinted bream, but always the small fish prey- 

 ing about the woodwork. The engineer of one of the pilot 

 boats stepped ashore, and in a minute caught two silver- 

 sides, just the things for live or dead bait fishing, and for 

 that purpose he used them, threading a large single hook 

 through the skin of the side and hurling the bait with a 

 pound and a half of lead far out into the lake. He said he 

 generally took a fish as long as his arm when he tried. 



But, for a moment, I must leave such trifles as natural 

 history jottings, to which I had at one time intended to 

 confine myself, and look at the Suez Canal from a practical 

 stand-point It was not a bad idea to speak of it as a 

 continuous dock nearly ninety miles long, though the com- 

 parison was decidedly uncomplimentary to the genus dock. 

 Whatever else the famous canal may be, it certainly cannot 

 boast any charms of landscape scenery. A thread of silver 

 shot through a vast fabric of brown sand, it is still essentially 

 part only of a desert whole. Yet it should have some attrac- 

 tions to the traveller using it for the first time, and this quite 

 apart from the new interest felt by politicians and financiers 

 now that, more than ever since its establishment, the scheme 



has become deserving of the original title " Compagnie 



Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez" 



