assage of boats in
the year A.D. 1000, after which it was neglected and became choked with
sand. While not thereafter used for navigation, there were parts which
during the time of the annual inundation of the Nile were filled with
water, until Mehemet Ali prevented this. The parts filled during the
inundation extended as far as Sheykh Hanaydik, near Toussun and the
Bitter Lakes.

The old canal which left the Nile at Cairo had long ceased to flow
beyond the outskirts of the city, and the still more ancient canal from
the neighbourhood of Bubastis, now known as the Wady Canal, extended
only a few miles in the direction of the isthmus as far as Kassassin.
During the construction of the Suez Canal the need of supplying the
labourers with fresh water was imperative. The company, therefore,
determined in 1861 to prolong the canal from Kassassin to the centre of
the isthmus, and in the year 1863 they brought the fresh-water canal as
far as Suez. In one or two places the bed of the old canal was cleared
out and made to serve the new canal. The level of the fresh-water canal
is about twenty feet above that of the Suez Canal, which it joins at
Ismailia by means of two locks. The difference of level between it and
the Red Sea is remedied by four locks constructed between Nefeesh and
its terminus at Suez. Its average depth of water at high Nile is six
feet, and at low Nile three feet.

A canal from Bulak, near Cairo, passing by Heliopolis and Belbeys, and
joining the Wady Canal a few miles east of Zagazig, restores the line
of water communication between the Nile and the Red Sea as it existed
perhaps in the time of Trajan, and certainly as it was in the time of
the Caliph Omar. The improvement of this canal as a means of transit is
local and external only.

Napoleon Bonaparte was the first in modern times to take up the subject
of a water connection between the two seas. In 1798 he examined the
traces of the old canal of Necho and his successors, and ordered
Monsieur Lepere to survey the isthmus and prepare a project for uniting
the two seas by a direct canal. The result of this French engineer's
labours was to discover a supposed difference of thirty feet between
the Red Sea at high tide and the Mediterranean at low tide. As this
inequality of level seemed to preclude the idea of a direct maritime
canal, a compromise was recommended.

Owing to the exertions of Lieutenant Waghorn, the route through
Egypt for the transmission