View PDF version of this page

the vessels at one end of the Canal—at Port Said or Suez—and are put down at the other ; but these lights for the time seem to be part of the vessels' life, wandering portents, born in remote regions ; and they move and move, and pass each other, like the spirits of two hemispheres. As I stood and looked, I seemed to myself that night to be still in the ancient world, standing at the portals of the modern, and to see its frontiers marked by a river of unnatural water, and patrolled and guarded by unnatural gliding fires. It is true that as I went down the Canal next morning to Ismailia in a post-boat full of passengers who had just arrived from London, matters assumed a more common-place aspect ; but even in daylight there is much to impress the imagination in this broad street of water, which for half a day's journey runs as straight as an arrow ; in the ocean steamers, now no longer stars, but immense moving masses, succeeding each other at constant intervals, and in the fact that four out of every five of them gave to our ears as we passed the sound of English voices, and bore at their sterns some name like London, I iverpool, or Glasgow. There is something which mounts to the eyes and makes the breath come quicker, in the thought that on half the decks of Britain the sunlight is always shining. A foreigner never knows the greatness of our country till he has visited it : we never know its greatness till we have left it. The realities of modern life, as I was reluctantly 288 IN AN ENCHANTED ISLAND

View PDF version of this page