THROUGH THE SUEZ CANAL it from end to end with our engineers; watched the steam shovels gouging the earth out of the Culebra Cut, and travelled in a canoe down that part of it which was once the Chagres River. I have also gone through the Suez Canal at three different times and have made many notes of its construction.

The two undertakings are vitally different. The Suez Canal is little more than a great ditch through the desert, and although it is just about twice as big as Panama it does not compare with the latter in the engineering dif¬ ficulties of its construction. The ground here is com¬ paratively level. That of the Panama Canal route is up hill and down, going right across the backbone of the Andes. The amount excavated here was one hundred million cubic yards, or just about one hundred million tons of dead weight. On one of my visits to Panama I figured that the excavation of Culebra would just equal a ditch three feet wide and three feet deep and long enough to go two times around this twenty-five-thousand-mile globe with ten thousand miles of ditch to spare.

Twenty thousand and more of the Egyptian fellahs were employed upon the Suez Canal at a time, and they scooped up much of the dirt in their hands and carried it away in baskets. At the start men were paid from ten to fifteen cents a day and boys under twelve only five cents. After a time they were not paid at all. The Khedive agreed to furnish all the labourers, and they worked for the French under the lash just as the Hebrews did for the Egyptians in the days of Pharaoh ages ago. With up-to-date canal-dredging machinery and steam shovels the work of digging the canal at Suez could perhaps be reproduced at one half its original cost.

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