Feeling sure now of his hold on the populace, Bonaparte, at the close of the year, undertook a journey to Suez and the Sinaitic peninsula.  It offered that combination of utility and romance which ever appealed to him.  At Suez he sought to revivify commerce by lightening the customs’ dues, by founding a branch of his Egyptian commercial company, and by graciously receiving a deputation of the Arabs of Tor who came to sue for his friendship.[111] Then, journeying on, he visited the fountains of Moses; but it is not true that (as stated by Lanfrey) he proceeded to Mount Sinai and signed his name in the register of the monastery side by side with that of Mahomet.  On his return to the isthmus he is said to have narrowly escaped from the rising tide of the Red Sea.  If we may credit Savary, who was not of the party, its safety was due to the address of the commander, who, as darkness fell on the bewildered band, arranged his horsemen in files, until the higher causeway of the path was again discovered.  North of Suez the traces of the canal dug by Sesostris revealed themselves to the trained eye of the commander.  The observations of his engineers confirmed his conjecture, but the vast labour of reconstruction forbade any attempt to construct a maritime canal.  On his return to Cairo he wrote to the Imam of Muscat, assuring him of his friendship and begging him to forward to Tippoo Sahib a letter offering alliance and deliverance from “the iron yoke of England,” and stating that the French had arrived on the shores of the Red Sea “with a numerous and invincible army.”  The letter was intercepted by a British cruiser; and the alarm caused by these vast designs only served to spur on our forces to efforts which cost Tippoo his life and the French most of their Indian settlements.

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CHAPTER IX

SYRIA

Meanwhile Turkey had declared war on France, and was sending an army through Syria for the recovery of Egypt, while another expedition was assembling at Rhodes.  Like all great captains, Bonaparte was never content with the defensive:  his convictions and his pugnacious instincts alike urged him to give rather than to receive the blow; and he argued that he could attack and destroy the Syrian force before the cessation of the winter’s gales would allow the other Turkish expedition to attempt a disembarkation at Aboukir.  If he waited in Egypt, he might have to meet the two attacks at once, whereas, if he struck at Jaffa and Acre, he would rid himself of the chief mass of his foes.  Besides, as he explained in his letter of February 10th, 1799, to the Directors, his seizure of those towns would rob the English fleet of its base of supplies and thereby cripple its activities off the coast of Egypt.  So far, his reasons for the Syrian campaign are intelligible and sound.  But he also gave out that, leaving Desaix and his Ethiopian supernumeraries to defend Egypt, he himself would accomplish the conquest of Syria and the East:  he would raise in revolt the Christians of the Lebanon and Armenia, overthrow the Turkish power in Asia, and then march either on Constantinople or Delhi.