- _ Chalouf
Official Journal of the French Empire Wednesday 1 December 1869 (n°330 p1535)
On leaving Lake Timsah, you re-enter the canal and, after passing Toussoum (the Company’s oldest encampment in the area) you arrive at Serapeum, a mound thus named because of the remains of a temple to Serapis there and where one of the deepest trenches of the canal was dug. Here, also, is the junction between the fresh water canal and the maritime one. You next enter the Bitter Lakes. Previously, the forty kilometre area covered by these two lakes was nothing but a dip in the soil, impregnated with salt. Then last February, the waters of the Mediterranean starting filling this vast basin: it took no less than seven months for the waters from the Serapeum basin to reach the level they are at now. They now form two extensive lakes which cover a sandy bottom and have completely submerged the forest of El Amback with its kilometres of ancient tamarisks. Today, the trees, hidden under the lake water, still raise the tops of their branches out of the water and there is nothing stranger than seeing these black tops standing like marine plants and covered with the same aquatic birds that inhabit the borders of the Nile: especially the flamingo but also the ibis, which live in this area so close to the Red Sea thanks to the Mediterranean waves. On leaving the Bitter Lakes, you leave behind you the Gebel Geneffe mountain to your right. Then after the Chalouf encampment, you finally see a long blue line in the distance which intermingles with the blue of the sky: it is the mouth of the canal, the Red Sea.