FROM THE MONITEUR,
(THE OFFICIAL PAPER OF FRANCE,)
6th July, 1855.
THE CUTTING OF THE ISTHMUS OF SUEZ.

This undertaking, one of the grandest and most useful of the age, has for some time attracted a considerable share of public attention. There is but one opinion as to its immense results, but the question of the track has been a subject of discussion, which, in the absence of authentic documents and an exact knowledge of the localities, may mislead public opinion.

Two tracks have been proposed: one direct, which is to unite the two Seas by a Canal in a straight line from Suez to Pelusium; the other indirect, which, starting from Suez, joins the Nile below Cairo, and terminates at the port of Alexandria.

In the eyes of all who are acquainted with Egypt the direct track alone appears practicable, the indirect track however has recently found its advocates in some European journals; the following particulars, collected on the spot, will enlighten public opinion upon this point.

In the first place there is a difference of length between the two tracks, which is not unimportant. The direct track being the shortest, would certainly not, of itself, be sufficient to give it the preference, especially if the other were both most economical and most advantageous; but it appears that besides having the advantage of being much shorter, the direct track also has the recommendations of being more economical, more advantageous, and more easy of execution.

1st. The indirect Canal has to cross the Nile, and this condition is almost impossible to be carried out. The crossings of rivers are attended, as is well known, with difficulties, even when there is only a draught of water of 2 to 3 met.: what would they be for a Canal which is to be 8 met. deep? And even one of the most decided partisans of the indirect track has not hesitated to declare frankly, considering this immense obstacle, which alarms but does not discourage him: “that the maintenance of such a depth presents difficulties which have never been surmounted nor even attempted.” It is true that at first the help of the barrage was reckoned upon in risking the crossing of the river; but this barrage can only serve at the low waters during four or five months of the year, at the time when the lands are irrigated to prepare for the summer crops; the reserved waters of the Nile will never, even at their maximum, be more than 4 to 4½ met., which is very far from 8 met. Above the barrage, at the point where the ships are to cross, the breadth is 2000 met. and if a transverse channel were dug there, how could it be prevented from filling with alluvium and mud? During the increase of the waters, how could a current of five miles an hour, be crossed by sailing vessels against the wind blowing from the east and south?

Against this formidable obstacle to the crossing which cannot be avoided, an expedient not less surprising, and still more impracticable, has been devised; the barrage is set aside, the employment of it being too hazardous, and the Nile is to be crossed by a bridge Canal. But can we form an idea of a Canal 8 met. deep crossing a river like the Nile above the barrage? According to the very calculations of those who propose such schemes, there would be required 1,213,147 met. cub. of water per diem to supply the upper basin, and as this enormous quantity of water would have to be raised thirty metres above the level of the two Seas; the engines required for this purpose must represent 5620 horse power by calculation, corresponding to 6000 horse power in those to be provided; not to speak of the obstacles that such a colossal work would oppose to the ordinary navigation, it would be an expense upon that point only of 50 to 60,000,000 francs. And the bridge Canal after all these sacrifices, would not be more firm or more durable than any construction of that kind. And moreover for this super elevation of level there would be required ten locks in addition to the fourteen already on the line.

2nd. The indirect Canal will be detrimental to the Canal works, so necessary to Lower Egypt, and will partly interfere with that admirable hydraulic system, which is at once the pride and the fertilization of the country. It will be in vain to make circuits to avoid the branchings of the network; as the termination is to be at the port of Alexandria, it will be absolutely necessary to pass between the Mahmoudieh Canal and Lake Mareotis; and then the flow of all the waters into the Lake which is destined to receive them will be prevented. Passing through the Lake, as the railway does, seas of mire will be met with, so much dreaded on the Pelusiac coast. It has already been necessary to raise again and again the embankment of the railway which was disappearing in the Lake, and for three years it has been necessary to labour unceasingly at the repairs which are continually required; what will it be when a dyke must be constructed at least 6000 metres in length, to heights of 7 to 8 metres, without knowing where to procure the necessary earth for these embankments?

3rd. The indirect Canal cannot terminate in the port of Alexandria without causing still greater confusion there than it causes in the Canal works. In the first place the port of Alexandria is not immutable, as has been supposed. It has not escaped the action of the ground swell, which has choked it with sand to a good third of its extent. The part of the port which has been selected is frequently agitated by the north-west winds, and the surf is then so violent in rough weather, that even small craft dare not approach it. The rock is found there at a small depth below the sea, and as it would be necessary to extend the dykes of the Canal to 250 metres into the harbour, to obtain a draught of water of 7 met., 50 to 8 met., the rock would have to be excavated under the water. Add to this that in this direction all the grand magazines and all the Government works would be encountered; there is not the least free space between the railway and the Mahmoudieh canal. But let us suppose all these difficulties overcome, there are others which the Canal raises, and which it multiplies the more it is employed. The port of Alexandria, the only military port of Egypt, is then besieged by hundreds of merchant vessels, and by the sailors of the whole of Europe. Let there be a contrary wind ever so slight, or some requisite repairs to the locks, and that the movement is arrested, just fancy the impediment, without taking into account the political dangers of such an accumulation. Moreover it is not only at Alexandria that this intolerable inconvenience would arise; it might happen, in consequence of accidents easily to be foreseen but impossible to be prevented, that Egypt should see all on a sudden 8 to 10,000 foreign sailors stationed on a point of her territory, because the forty vessels at least which traverse it every day have been forcibly detained at some part of the passage during twenty or five and twenty days consecutively.

To these conclusive reasons, it would not be difficult to add others; but these must be sufficient to warn unbiassed minds against the indirect passage.

The inconveniences, or rather the impossibilities of the indirect track, become more striking when compared with the conditions of the direct track and its incontestable advantages.

1st. To begin with, the direct track is only about one third the length of the other. That would be 400 kilometres long, and the direct track is only 155, which would be reduced to 120, as will be seen. Near about the middle of the Isthmus, the Bitter Lakes are met with, which give 18 kilometres of navigation ready made, and not requiring a single turn of the shovel, as the Viceroy’s engineers say, and 18 kilometres in addition are three parts excavated by nature itself; 120 kilometres therefore remain, that is to say, 30 leagues at the most.

2nd. The direct track is the easiest. There are only two salient points in the entire Isthmus that it is necessary to traverse by partly turning them; one, the Serapeum, which, according to the levels checked in 1853, is 16 met., 5950 high; and the other El Guisr, which is 11 met., 6300. With the depth of the Canal, this would make a cutting of 20 or at most 24 metres at some points. There is certainly nothing in such a work to terrify our engineers.

3rd. The direct track is the most natural. The Isthmus is traversed by a longitudinal depression, formed by the meeting of the two plains descending with an imperceptible slope, the one from Egypt, the other from the frontier hills of Asia. The Bitter Lakes, filled with the waters of the Arabian Gulf by the action of the tides only, may easily form a reservoir which, with a surface of 280,000,000 square metres by a rise of 2 metres of moving waters, would not receive less than 560,000,000 cubic metres, for the service of the Canal, below the water line at the level of the two Seas. Lake Timsah, situated at about an equal distance from Suez and Pelusium, is like an inland port where ships can be revictualled and repaired. Moreover, by another favour of nature, towards Lake Timsah a second not less remarkable hollow abuts perpendicularly on the longitudinal depression, it is that of the Wady-Tomilat (the fertile Goshen of the Bible). This hollow still receives the overflowings of the Nile for a great part of its length, and forms the natural track of a communication starting from the river and joining, at the central part of the Isthmus, the line of maritime navigation which would be established between the Arabian Gulf and the Mediterranean.

4th. The direct track is the most useful. It serves at the same time the interests of commerce in general and the political interests of Egypt and the Ottoman Empire. It will require but little to maintain it, and as there will be very few works of art, navigation will not be exposed to those interruptions which it would have to dread on the indirect track.

To these evident advantages of the direct track, to these relative facilities which had attracted the attention of the sovereigns of Egypt, of Amrou and Mustapha III. for example (see Lebeau, Histoire du Bas-Empire, tom. XII. p. 490, and the MÉmoires du Baron de Tott sur les Turcs, pts. III. and IV.), before attracting that of the nineteenth century, there is but one objection, and it is this:—

It is impossible, they say, for large ships to approach Pelusium; and the direct Canal is chimerical, because it cannot open into the Mediterranean.

This oft-repeated objection is but specious, and cannot stand before an examination of the facts. The entrance to Pelusium is certainly a difficult and costly work, but it is perfectly practicable, and engineers have overcome very different obstacles with resources much inferior to those now at their command.

It is well in the first place that it should be known that the level of the two Seas, excepting the difference of the tides, which are pretty high at the south in the Red Sea, and almost nothing at the north in the Mediterranean, is perceptibly the same. The commission of 1799 had found for the Arabian Gulf an elevation of 9 met. 90; but its labours, performed in the midst of all the dangers and disturbances of war, had not been verified, and the genius of Laplace resting upon accurate theoretical views, had formally denied the possibility of such a depression within a distance of scarcely thirty leagues. Afterwards, towards 1840, some English officers had proved by the barometer and the boiling water process that there was no difference of level; and in 1843, Prince Metternich, having been informed of these labours, sent instructions to Egypt to induce Mehemet Ali to interest himself in the grand undertaking of the cutting of the Isthmus: his dispatch is still in the Archives of the Austrian Consulate at Alexandria. In 1847 a commission of French engineers, sent out by M. Paulin Talabot under the direction of the learned M. Bourdaloue, and assisted by Egyptian engineers directed by M. Linant, chief engineer to the Viceroy, put the fact beyond all question, and M. Paulin Talabot had the honour of stating it in a memorial that has become famous. Our Academy of Sciences bestirred itself for the honour of the ancient Egyptian commission. M. Sabatier, Consul general of France, asked the Viceroy for a fresh verification, which M. Linant was charged to undertake in 1853, and which confirmed, saying an insignificant variation, the labours of 1847.

So that the considerable super-elevation of the Red Sea cannot be reckoned on for facilitating the approaches from the Mediterranean at the other extremity of the Canal; there is only the difference of the tides.

As a depth of 7 met. 50 to 8 met. is not found before Pelusium or Tineh, but at a distance of 6000 met. into the sea, it is assumed that it is practically impossible to prolong the jetty of the Canal to that distance, because the waters are but liquid mud, and that clouds of earth would interfere with the progress of the vessels and the solidity of the works.

This is a complete mistake.

Because Herodotus has said, that the Delta is a present from the Nile, his inaccurate assertion has been repeated without verifying it, and his metaphor has passed for an incontestable truth. But it is an absolute fact, and it is only necessary to ask those who have been at Pelusium, that the water there is as limpid as at Alexandria or Jaffa. The banks of travelling mud seen by Admiral Sir Sidney Smith have no more reality than the present from the Nile, and for the twenty years that these coasts have been traversed in every direction by steam boats, no one has ever met again with those muddy banks. The truth is, that the waters of the Nile, which, at the time of the inundation are distinguished for more than ten leagues into the sea, carry far out into the Mediterranean and deposit in its depths, the masses of earthy matter which they hold in suspension (near 1/8000) which do not reappear on the coasts but in imperceptible quantities; the truth is, that a handful of sand may be taken up from the sea beach, at Pelusium, without finding the least particle of mud. The Viceroy’s engineers have proved that the coast, from El-Arish to Tripoli, is pure sand, and the soundings taken along the shore give the same result. Far from the Nile forming accretions at Pelusium, it is an axiom now admitted by science that the muddy or sandy deposits observed at the mouths of rivers are entirely owing to matters brought by the tide. The rivers have no part therein; and the excellent observations made by most able hydrographers at the bay of Mount St. Michael, at the mouths of the Scheld, the Meuse, the Rhine, the Yssel, have superabundantly proved it. The accumulations of sand at Pelusium and Suez, like the whole Isthmus, have been formed by the maritime deposits of the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. The thorough investigation of the motion of the waves has demonstrated that the bars of rivers are due to the ground swell alone. The Nile, therefore, has no influence upon the approaches to Pelusium, as Herodotus supposed, and as is still the common opinion; and this is so true, that for 20 kilometres above its mouth there are accretions of mud, while below there is nothing but sand. Finally the accumulations of sand are more considerable in proportion as the waters of the river are less abundant.

Setting aside from the question the hypothetical assertions, it remains therefore incontestable that the only difficulty at Pelusium, is the length of the jetties in the sea. Pelusium, with its ruins, is at the same point where Strabo saw it, where the Egyptian commission saw it, which found the twenty stadia of the Greek geographer between the shore and the town quite correct. But are jetties of a league and a half into the sea possible, or are they indeed a work that cannot be executed? The answer to this question is easy: a hundred years ago, the Hollanders, not so rich and not so skillful as we are now, although quite as bold, erected at the Cape, in the bay of the Lion, at a depth of 16 met., in spite of the most frightful tempests, a dyke of 8000 metres, that is, a work of at least four times the extent of that required for the entrance of the Canal at Pelusium.

As for the harbour of Suez, the work there would be comparatively trifling because it is sheltered from all the winds, excepting that from the south-east, and ships keep the sea there very well, as is proved by the English Magazine corvette, moored there for two years, without sustaining any damage.

What is to be deduced from these observations?—That it is possible to make a canal 100 metres wide from Suez to Pelusium, with a draught of water of 8 met., below low water in the Mediterranean, with parapets, towing path, &c. and available for the passage of screw and paddle frigates, and vessels of 1000 to 1500 tons burthen, and that this canal, following the straight line between the two Seas is the only practicable one, as it will be one of the grandest and most useful works ever performed by man.

To conclude, this track is the only one that the prince who now rules in Egypt will allow. Well informed himself in nautical arts and sciences, the inheritor of the policy of Mehemet Ali, which he approves while he practises, he has declared in dictating his own terms for the firman of concession, that he would have the shortest and least expensive track, and one that would be available for the largest ships. It is not in the scheme of an inland canal that the real junction of the two Seas consists; the indirect canal cuts through Egypt, and not the Isthmus; its extent is not only tripled, but the cost of execution and maintenance are enormous, and the existence of a canal constructed upon these conditions would be always uncertain and precarious while the direct track, which unites so many advantages, has none of these drawbacks.

HÔte.