Battlefield of Tel-el-Kebir

       Now we are passing through Goshen, the land into which Pharaoh turned Jacob's cattle. It is still flowing with milk and honey. Where the grass ends the crops begin. Cattle browsing, camels laden on the way to the markets, palm trees and cactus, acacia and sycamore, line the way. Some of the dark-faced farmers gathering the old crops, others planting for new crops. "So the ploughman overtakes the reaper." But this verdant and foliaged farm scene is surrounded by desert, and into that we pass and arrive at Tel-el-Kebir, the great battlefield where the English, under Wolseley, and the Egyptians met, and from which field the only harvest ever reaped was an awful harvest of immortal men. Over these sands, not in this balmy atmosphere, but in consuming summer, the hosts of Englishmen marched and fought and fainted and died. On one side is a fenced and shaded cemetery, with marble headstones, in which many of the officers sleep the last sleep. But many of the troops, the thousands of private soldiers who had fathers and mothers and wives and sisters and children, are in trenches where they were tumbled, far away from home and without a prayer. The siroccos of this African desert will make playthings of the skeletons of the fallen cohorts.

• The Land of Goshen 
• All About... Goshen
• View Goshen
• The Land of Goshen Is Set Apart

       Now we are on the Suez Canal. Between Egypt and Arabia we are sailing over this wonderful sheet of water which marries the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. We have just passed a great ocean steamer that has on it all the marks of wrestling with mighty waters. Wonderful De Lesseps, that he should have had this canal in his brain before he projected it in the presence of all nations. What independence of character, what courage, what persistence it all implies on his part. What a grand thing for a man to do that which all the world pronounces impossible. How many hands, how many spades, how many weary arms and shoulders and feet were required for a work like this i I am impressed all along this route with the fact that in eight days the Israelites would have reached Canaan if they had gone straight, though it took them forty years. But it was best that they be lost in the wilderness. They were a nation of slaves, and had they gone into Canaan thus undisciplined and unorganized, the nations of Canaan would have made only one meal of them. But they had forty years of schooling and became developed heroes and then were ready in the name of the God of Israel to defy and rout opposing hosts.

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