Page:H. D. Traill - From Cairo to the Soudan Frontier.djvu/45

Rh seem more unearthly than the whole scene. As we creep thus leisurely onward the sound of our engines has become little more than an audible murmur. No faintest echo of man or animal reaches us from either shore. The silence is unbroken save by the occasional clang of the electric signal bell from the bridge and the sleepy lapping of the water about our bows. The endless train of buoys filing dimly past us on the waters, the canal banks drifting by in grey monotony, begin at last to affect the senses like the reiterated cadence of a song. They lull your brain by degrees, especially at midnight, into a sort of half-waking slumber, in which you seem to be sailing dream-like through a world of dreams, till at last you might almost believe that the mysterious channel itself which you are navigating is still the vision that it was to the Pharaoh of 3000 years ago, and to Persian and to Greek, to Roman and to Arab since his day, and that M. Ferdinand de Lesseps never appeared among the sons