It has been contended, as an argument against the Suez canal, that if it were practicable to keep open a great waterway between the two oceans, the canal which passed through so many vicissitudes would not have been allowed again and again to become obliterated, nor would cargoes have been discharged at Myos Hormos, the great port at the entrance to the Gulf of Suez, and carried overland to the Nile, a distance of some 80 miles, at a time when the canal appears to have been available, if it had been entirely satisfactory. But there are several considerations entering into the question of transport at that time that cannot be very readily appreciated now. The camel was then the ship of the desert to a much greater extent than it has been in more modern times. The knowledge of navigation was far from perfect, and the dangers of the Red Sea, which are now trifling, were then deemed so formidable that vessels discharged their cargoes in the harbour of Massowah, whence they were sent 1500 miles across the desert on the backs of camels, rather than face the Red Sea route _viâ_ Suez, although, as the canal was then open, a vessel from the east might have made use of it and reached Alexandria or Ostia without breaking bulk. To our own times, and in the light of our fuller knowledge, this seems to be little short of incredible. Many centuries later than the time of which we write, St. Jerome, in speaking of the Red Sea, declared that mariners who had been six months at sea deemed themselves fortunate if they had traversed its full length, and reached a port of safety.[139] The first recorded attempt at the construction of a canal was made in this very region, Neco, the son of Psammiticus, having connected the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Pelusiac branch of the Nile at Bubastis (Zigazig).[140] The narrow channel which here connected the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Red Sea, appears to have been closed by an upheaval of the soil. At the southern end of the gulf (Bitter Lakes) goods were landed and carried onward to the Red Sea. Darius subsequently dug a canal along the line of the ancient junction of the Gulf of Heroopolis with the Red Sea, as shown in the annexed sketch by the letters A A. This canal, which was also called the canal of the Pharaohs and of Trajan, is understood to have finally disappeared in the eighth century. [Illustration: THE CANAL OF RAMESES.]