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forgotten canal—a green pencil line stretching from the Hilton to the railway station. 2 One can travel beside the canal today from Cairo to Zagazig, as Marcella and I did in 2006; it remains about one hundred feet wide the entire way.
    To see how the river has gradually narrowed, you can take a felucca up the Nile, sailing with a gentle breeze against the current, which in autumn is about half a knot. The old Roman fortress of Babylon is still visible, with a very old Coptic church on top of it. A little group of Coptic churches and a synagogue surround the remains of the Roman city. Here the Egyptian authorities, have erected a sign stating: this was the entrance to the red sea nile canal.
    A mass of information exists about the evolution of the canal from the time of the Pharaoh Necho II (610–595 B.C. ). Herodotus tells us ( Histories ) that four steles were erected by Darius (522–486 B.C. ) to commemorate the canal’s construction. Berkeley professor Carol A. Redmount in “The Wadi Tumilat and the Canal of the Pharaohs” writes that the steles were placed on elevations so they could be seen by boats on the canal. The westernmost stele was discovered at Tell el-Maskhuta; the others were found along the canal, ending about six kilometers north of Suez. One face of each stele features hieroglyphs, the other cuneiform (in Persian, Elemite, and Babylonian characters). 3
    Professor Redmount tells us that Herodotus, who visited Egypt inthe mid-fifth century B.C. , was the first classical author to mention explicitly the canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea. He said the canal was started by Necho II and completed by Darius. Aristotle, writing in the fourth century B.C. , cites Sesostris as the canal’s creator. Ptolomy II, Philadelphus (reigned 285–246 B.C. ), records the cutting of the canal through the Wadi Tumilat. He is followed by Diodorus Siculus, who, on a visit to Egypt in 59 B.C. , confirmed that the waterway was begun by Necho, continued by Darius, and finally completed by Ptolemy II, who provided a lock to compensate for the rise and fall of the Nile. According to Strabo (64 B.C. – A.D. 24), the canal was 46 meters wide and of sufficient depth to accommodate large ships. In his Natural History, Pliny states that the canal was 100 feet wide and 40 feet deep for a distance of 37 1 /2 Roman miles up to the Bitter Springs. The Alexandrian astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus, or Ptolemy, called the canal “the River of Trajan” and indicated that it started from the main Nile stream upriver from Babylon—that is, from Heliopolis. Lucien, an Egyptian official under the Antonine emperors, in about A.D. 170 described a traveler who sailed the canal from Alexandria to Clysma on the Gulf of Suez:
    Then came the Arabs.
    [The] Caliph Muiz had invested a fortune of his own to conquer Egypt, so he obviously wanted to get back his investment as quickly as possible, and as always the Red Sea Canal was to be implement of his wealth. The customs port of Al Maks, which means “customs tax,” lay in the bend of the river which came almost up to the walls of Kahira on the west side near the canal, and this Mu’iz immediately took over and expanded into a proper dockyard, keeping its tax collecting character but also laying the foundations there for a new port of his own, which immediately took away much of the business that usually went to Fustat-Misr.
    Here Mu’iz built six hundred ships and about 77 years later, when Nasir Ibn Khusrau came to Cairo [in the 11th century], seven of his ships were still lying on the river bank. “I, the author of this narrative, Ibn Khusrau says: ‘I have seen them’”. They measured thirty erich by sixty arech (275 feet long by 110 feet abeam). These ships were no doubt a brilliant investment becausethey could move large quantities of cargo at one time, rather like the modern monstrous oil tankers. Nothing that could make