ius
took up the work on the abandoned canal, but his engineers told him
that its completion would cause a deluge, and he desisted. About three
hundred years before Christ was born, Ptolemy Philadelphus constructed
a lock-and-dam canal through which ships made the journey from one of
the mouths of the Nile to the site of modern Suez. Continued wars
interrupted commerce, and the locks and dams fell into decay, so that
Cleopatra's navy was unable to escape to the Red Sea by canal. The
Roman engineers later patched up the canal so that their galleys made
their way from sea to sea; but when the Arabs came in A.D. 700 they
found it choked up. Amrou, the Arab, cleared it out, but it was soon
permitted to fill up again, and not until the great Napoleon reached
Egypt was the canal project again considered. Napoleon abandoned the
idea only because his engineers assured him that the level of the
Mediterranean was thirty feet below that of the Red Sea. He then
considered a lock-and-dam canal, but he evacuated Egypt before anything
came of it. Of course, all those ancient canals were very narrow and
shallow, and no boat now dignified with the business of carrying cargo
for profit could have entered any one of them."

MEHEMET ALI WAS WARY

"Mehemet Ali, the great pasha who founded the present Egyptian
khedivate, was urged to attempt the canal project, but he was wary. At
last he pushed it aside, and listened to the Englishman, Robert
Stephenson--the father of the railroad. Under Stephenson's supervision
he built a railroad from Cairo to Suez, connecting with the line from
Cairo to Alexandria. This formed the "great overland route" to India,
and brought great trade and many rich tolls to the Egyptians.

"The time came when Said Pasha ruled in Cairo. To him came Ferdinand
de Lesseps. Years before, while a clerk in the French consulate
general in Cairo, De Lesseps dreamed the dream of the great canal. He
was not an engineer, but he was a master diplomatist. He unfolded his
plans to Said, who loved France and all Frenchmen, and met with
encouragement. It was a magnificent scheme. The canal was not to cost
Egypt one cent, but was to pay fifteen per cent. of its receipts to the
Egyptian government, and at the expiration of ninety-nine years was to
become the absolute property of Egypt. On such terms the concession
was given to De Lesseps in 1856.

"Then De Lesseps went forth to get the money. France had just come ou