Page:On the Desert - Recent Events in Egypt.djvu/57

 given it, we might be on the prairies of Illinois. But the Arabs and the camels and the palm-trees are not Dutch nor American.

About fifty miles from Cairo, we come to Zagazig — a place which has risen to importance as a centre of the railway system of Egypt, the line from Cairo meeting that from Alexandria, and going on to Ismailia and Suez. Soon after leaving Zagazig, the railway runs parallel to the Sweet Water Canal, and after a few miles passes over a spot which six months later was to be made famous by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir.

But as we could not anticipate history that was to come, our thoughts were of history long past and remote. We were here skirting the land of Goshen, where Jacob and his sons settled when they came into Egypt, and from which four hundred years later Moses led the Exodus of the Israelites, then grown to be a nation of two (perhaps three) millions of people. When they rose up in the night to flee out of Egypt, it is not probable that they intended to march by the way of the desert: for that was far aside from the direct route to Canaan, the land promised to their fathers. At first they moved to the northeast, following the old caravan route to Syria, from which they were turned back by a line of forts which stretched along the border of Egypt — the dividing-line between Asia and Africa. It was then that they turned southward to make their escape, and that the Egyptians, following hard after them, thought that they had caught them between the mountains and the sea, which had "shut them in"; and it was only when the Israelites had crossed the Red Sea, which not only overwhelmed their enemies, but put a barrier to further pursuit, that they were safe.

At Ismailia we struck the desert, which here appears, not as a level plain, but undulating like the rolling prairies