Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/34

16 release of Continental industry from its overwhelming military burdens! Seas, however, have no quarrel with each other, and the isthmuses which sunder them in both hemispheres, to the diversion of human intercourse by many thousand miles of ocean from its shortest routes, are really mere obstructions, and nothing more. Nature began it, at any rate in the Eastern hemisphere. Her original idea, according to the geologist, was to divide Asia from Africa by a waterway, and not by an isthmus, and, probably, for a little matter of a few million ages, the Red Sea flowed amicably onwards past what is now the head of the Gulf of Suez, and met the waters of the Mediterranean in a fraternal embrace.

Unfortunately, however, at some remote geological period she changed her mind, set her gales and currents to work to sow strife between the two seas, and brought a northward-flowing stream on the one side in the teeth of southward-blowing winds on the