He might almost as well have talked of
cutting a canal from Brighton to the Devil's Dyke and 'submerging
England,' as the devil wished to do in the old legend. As a matter of
fact, good, practical M. Roudaire, sound engineer that he was, never
even dreamt of anything so chimerical. What he did really propose was
something far milder and simpler in its way, but, as his scheme has
given rise to the absurd notion that Sahara as a whole lies below
sea-level, it may be worth while briefly to explain what it was he
really thought of doing.
Some sixty miles south of Biskra, the most fashionable resort in the
Algerian Sahara, there is a deep depression two hundred and fifty miles
long, partly occupied by three salt lakes of the kind so common over the
whole dried-up Saharan area. These three lakes, shrunken remnants of
much larger sheets, lie below the level of the Mediterranean, but they
are separated from it, and from one another, by upland ranges which rise
considerably above the sea line. What M. Roudaire proposed to do was to
cut canals through these three barriers, and flood the basins of the
salt lakes. The result would have been, not as is commonly said to
submerge Sahara, nor even to form anything worth seriously describing as
'an inland sea,' but to substitute three larger salt lakes for the
existing three smaller ones. The area so flooded, however, would bear to
the whole area of Sahara something like the same proportion that Windsor
Park bears to the entire surface of England.
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