Page:The American encyclopedia of history, biography and travel (IA americanencyclop00blak).pdf/1012

 before we believed it to be other than an illusion: the sight of ships and steamers was the first thing that convinced us of the reality.

The portion of the road nearest to Suez is extremely rough, and the path is covered on every side with large rounded stones; the whole forming one of the most unsightly portions of the Desert. Barren and arid as it is, it is curious to find fresh plants of the water-melon species growing here and there on the most unfruitful-looking spots. The leaves are about the tint, form, and size of those of the sweet-scented geranium. The stems trail along the ground, attaining a length of two or three feet. The fruit is about the size of a smallish apple, bright-green, and very pretty. In many places here, the sand of the Desert is in process of solidification into rock. The muriates and sulphates of the sea-salt, with which the soil is charged, seem to act on the calcareous material abounding everywhere; and the result is a carbonate of soda and sulphate of lime. The last constitutes the cementing material: it is bright and shining, in small plates or crystals, and yields readily to the finger-nail. A specimen of the rock which is the result of this, would most grievously perplex a geologist not familiar with the process by which it is formed. It consists of the sand and the sea-shells of the Desert—the last of these, when near Suez, being all apparently perfectly recent and identical with those now in the Red Sea; of the Egyptian jaspers, which here mainly constitute the gravel of the Desert, and are themselves the remnants of an abraded conglomerate of one of the rock formations at hand, and of the oyster, nummulite, and other shells of the different varieties of tertiary limestone, everywhere presenting itself above the surrounding drift and alluvium. With these heterogeneous materials, the bones of birds and animals now existing in the country, or portions of the works of man, may occasionally mingle, and present a conglomerate made up of as many different kinds of material as can be collected together. This, it must be recollected, is a process not confined to a few limited spots: it is apparently in progress over vast expanses of surface in all parts of the Desert towards the shore of the Red Sea. Though there is no continuous rain, heavy showers occasionally fall near Suez; and in the pools formed by them, fishes, some inches long, have been found four or five miles from the sea.

When within four miles of Suez, you reach the edge of a perfectly level plain, diversified here and there by slight ridges and hillocks of sand and gravel, but the whole wearing the appearance of one of the most recent upheavals—the Red Sea, at a geological period comparatively recent, having obviously covered a large surface now dry land. It was noon before we reached Suez, and we were to leave at three; but as I had been before disappointed in my attempts to examine the country around, I was resolved to make the most of the two hours at my disposal. I accordingly, hammer in hand, and knapsack on back, proceeded to make a geological ramble; and I need only say, was amply repaid for my trouble, as well as for the annoyance from a scorching sun. Close to Suez is the track where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea in flying into the wilderness from Egyptian bondage. Wilkinson assumes the place to have been a little above the harbor, at the camel ford, where the water then must have been much deeper than now, and where the effects of 'a strong east wind,' as described in Exodus, are