"Looking ahead, you can see an expanse of water, which means that we are coming to the end of our canal travel," said the commander. "I suppose no one will be sorry for it; for we have had all our social arrangements as usual, and there has been something to see and much to learn all the way."
"It has not been at all like my canal travel at home," added Uncle Moses, who was the oldest person on board of the ship by one month, by which time Dr. Hawkes was his junior, and they were only fifty-four. "I went from Syracuse to Oswego by a canal boat when I was a young man. The trip was in the night, and I slept on a swinging shelf, held up by ropes; and we were bumping much of the time in the locks so that I did not sleep so well as I did last night. But what water have we ahead, Captain?"
"It is an arm of the Gulf of Suez, which is itself one of the two great arms of the Red Sea."
"It appears to be well armed," said Uncle Moses, who could be guilty of a pun on extreme provocation.
"Like yourself, it is provided with two arms, but it does not shoot with them," replied the captain. "On our left are the ruins of Arsinoe, which was an ancient port, once called Crocodilopolis; and, by the way, Lake Timsah was once Crocodile Lake, and doubtless the saurians formerly sported in its waters."
"About Arsinoe?" suggested the professor.
"Probably you know more about it than I do, Professor."
"I know little except that it was a commercial city of Egypt, built by Ptolemy II. The name is that of several females distinguished in one way or another in the ancient world, and the word is usually written with a diæresis over the final _e_, so that it is pronounced as though it were written Arsinoey. The city thrived for a time, and was the emporium of eastern Egypt; but the perils of the navigation in the north of the Red Sea diverted the trade into other channels, and the place went to decay. It was named by Ptolemy after his sister, who was married at sixteen to the aged king of Thrace. There is a bloody story connected with her life, which I will not repeat; but in the end she fled to the protection of her brother in Egypt, and after the fashion of that age and country, he made her his wife."