William H. Seward's travels around the world (1873) (14598126840)

Identifier: williamhsewardst01sewa (find matches)
Title: William H. Seward's travels around the world
Year: 1873 (1870s)
Authors: Seward, William Henry, 1801-1872 Seward, Olive Risley, 1844-1906
Subjects: Voyages around the world
Publisher: New York, D. Appleton and company
Contributing Library: The Library of Congress
Digitizing Sponsor: The Library of Congress



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s,except a small force of Arab laborers employed in keeping thecanal and railroad free from the whirling sands. On this journey we have made our first acquaintance with theBedouin Arabs. They were encamped with their camels and horseson an oasis of hardly thirty rods in circumference, its vegetationbeing due to a leakage of the small Sweet-water Canal. TheBedouin tents indicate vagrancy. TI13 encampment had no wom-en ; the men are stalwart and handsome. How long will it bebefore these travellers of the sands, dispensing with their cara-vans, will be buying excursion-tickets on railroads and steam-boats ? It is a singular contrast of mans enterprise against Naturesimpassibility that our path through the desert is marked out, notonly by the intcroceanic canal, but also by an interoceanic railroad,and by several telegraph-lines. Of these, the first is the Egyptianline; the second, the European and Indian line; the third, theSuez-Canal line. The whole of Egypt, Upper and Lower included, /
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w > .. .i:....Iii-, i . ■;i:...i.:l.!.. i, _ THE LAND OF GOSHEN. 439 does not furnish sufficient timber for telegraph-poles. These arebrought from the forests of the Danube. At the end of our two hours ride, we crossed a broad piece ofinterval land, here called a wadi/, which is partially irrigated by oneof the innumerable canals taken from the Nile. This wady is gen-erally understood to be within the district of Goshen. The ruinsof a large town on its borders are said to bear evidences of Jewisharchitecture. We, however, can state nothing, for we found, onarriving here, a traveller who, having inspected the site, pro-nounces the claim apocryphal. We came soon upon the plain ofthe great river, where land and wrater are always changing, andfound it covered with tropical vegetation, luxuriant and abundant.We had scarcely entered the plain before we observed troops oflank, half-famished dogs, resembling the jackal. No one claimsthem, and they know no master—they are not unjustly d