There is, of course, nothing to see at Port Said from a tourist's standpoint. The town is little more than a large coaling station, and is of very recent growth. It owes its existence solely to the Suez Canal, and to the fact that the water at that part of the coast is deeper than at Pelusium, where the isthmus is narrowest. The town is built partly on artificial foundations on the strip of low sand-banks which forms a natural sea-wall protecting Lake Menzaleh from the Mediterranean. In the autumn at high Nile it is surrounded on all sides by water. An imaginative writer once called Port Said the Venice of Africa--not a very happy description, as the essentially modern appearance of this coaling station strikes the most unobservant visitor. The comparison might for its inappositeness rank with the proverbial one between Macedon and Monmouth. Both Venice and Port Said are land-locked, and that is the only feature they have in common. The sandy plains in the vicinity of the town are, however, full of interest to the historian and archæologist. Here may be found ruins and remains of antiquity which recall a period of civilization reaching back more centuries than Port Said (built in 1859) does years. The ruins of Pelusium (the Sin of the Old Testament), the key of Northeastern Egypt in the Pharaonic period, are only eighteen miles distant, and along the shore may still be traced a few vestiges of the great highway--the oldest road in the world of which remains exist--constructed by Rameses II., in 1350 B. C., when he undertook his expedition for the conquest of Syria. To come to more recent history. It was on the Pelusiac shores that Cambyses defeated the Egyptians, and here some five centuries later Pompey the Great was treacherously murdered when he fled to Egypt, after the Battle of Pharsalia.