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| Portion of Suez Canal with Two Channels |
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| Tug Boat Alongside |
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| Desert View along Suez Canal |
Today we transited the Suez Canal. The canal is 120 miles in length. Three convoys pass through the canal each day, two southbound and one northbound. The first southbound one travels as far as the Great Bitter Lake, where it anchors until the northbound one can pass. We were at the head of the northbound convoy, so we had a relatively fast transit time of 8 hours. There are no locks in the Suez canal. Several large cities are on the banks of the canal - especially at each end. There is a highway bridge that is high enough that the Queen Elizabeth can pass under it. There is also a railway swing bridge that swings to the middle from the two sides to allow trains to pass over, several times a day.
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| Highway Bridge over the Suez Canal |
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| Railway Swing Bridge |
For Coptic Christians in Egypt this is Easter. We had a worship service this morning, lead by Don Goodhart, a retired Episcopal priest now living in Florida. Sumner read the lesson again. The lesson was from Paul’s letter to the Hebrews, and it describes the characteristics of faith - “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.” In the sermon, Don used Petra as the example of “a conviction of things not seen.”
By the 19th century, Petra was known only as a “lost city” of myth and legend. It was a European archeologist who had a strong enough faith in the existence of this rumored lost city, that he learned Arabic, went to live with a Bedouin tribe for years, and became a Muslim, before the Bedouins led him to the “Rose city half as old as time.” A remarkable example of faith acted upon.
By 2:00 PM we had passed through the canal. We are now traveling along the coast of Egypt, in the Mediterranean Sea, headed for Alexandria tomorrow.
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