Parts of the banks are walled with stones to prevent the sand from falling in and filling up the canal, but notwithstanding this the dredges have to be kept at work all the year round. Not far from Port Said I saw great steam pumps sucking the sand from the bottom of the channel and carrying it through pipes far out over the desert, and I am told that the process of cleaning and deepening the waterway is always going on. There are stations, or guard houses, at intervals along the course of the waterway and a few small towns have grown up here and there. While the boat was stopping at one of these, a dirty Arab brought alongside a leg of raw mutton. He offered to sell it to the passengers but found no buyer. Outside of these towns and the guard houses we see few signs of life. Here a camel caravan trots along over the desert. There a flock of long-necked cranes springs from the water into the air. When the sun is right, away across the hot desert at the side of the ship there looms up out of the sands a strange ship on other waters, apparently as real as those through which we are moving. That is the wonderful mirage of the desert, which so often deceives the thirsty traveller passing through it on camels. As we approach it, it soon fades and disappears like a veritable castle of the air. The Suez Canal of to-day is far different from that which was opened in 1869. As originally planned, the channel was less than twenty-five feet deep and so narrow that it could not have accommodated the shipping which goes through it nowadays. It has since been widened so that its average width at the surface is about three hundred feet, and the curves in it have been straightened so as to shorten the time of transit and enable ships to pass the more easily. The shipping facilities have been greatly improved both at Port Tewfik and at Port Said. At Port Said the coaling arrangements have been so improved that the largest steamers can load thousands of tons in a very few hours. The chief towns on the canal are Port Said, Ismailia, and Suez. Port Said is at the northern end of the canal where we took the steamer. This city, long said to be the wickedest and most dissipated station on the way from London to the Far East, was made and lives by the canal, the harbour being full of shipping from one year’s end to another. Ismailia, midway of the canal, is still scarcely more than a small town. It is now said to be a healthful place, although at one time it was malarial. The Arabs call it the “cleansed tomb.” This town is at the end of the fresh-water canal which was made during the building of the Suez Canal to supply the workmen with water, and is not far from Zagazig and the old Land of Goshen.