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Macao has belonged to Portugal since 1555. Its harbour has silted up, and its once flourishing trade has dwindled to nothing. Gambling houses are the only industry of the place. There are row and rows of these opposite the steamer landing, all kept by Chinamen, garish with coloured electric lights, each one clamorously proclaiming that it is the "only first-class gambling house in Macao."
Of immemorial antiquity, the harbour of Shoreham, first of Old Shoreham, perhaps the Roman Portus Adurni, and then when that silted up of New, has played always a great part in the history of South England. That the Romans knew and used it is certain.
Ferdinand has his best monument in the city itself, which he founded to take the place of Porto Pisano, that in the course of centuries had silted up. In order to populate the new port, he proclaimed there a religious liberty he denied to his Duchy at large. His policy was splendidly successful.
A former arm of the sea, the Rann of Cutch, adjoining the delta on the east has been silted up and is now an immense barren flat of sandy mud two hundred miles in length and one hundred miles in greatest breadth. Each summer it is flooded with salt water when the sea is brought in by strong southwesterly monsoon winds, and the climate during the remainder of the year is hot and dry.
Now these watercourses are robbed of their flow by the absorption of the rich plowed fields, are all silted up, and in summer are dry; and in spring and fall they are muddy bankless wrinkles in the fields, poached full by the hoofs of cattle and the snouts of hogs; and through many a swale, you would now be surprised to know, in 1855 there ran a brook two feet wide in a thousand little loops, with beautiful dark quiet pools at the turns, some of them mantled with white water-lilies, and some with yellow.
And there, on the low spurs, beyond the walls, he sighted the famous Tiger Fort, and the marble tomb of Jai Sing he that built the rose-red City; challenging the desert, as Canute the sea; saying, in terms of stone and mortar, 'Here shall thy proud waves be stayed! Nearing the fortified gateway, Roy noted how every inch of flat surface was silkily powdered, every opening silted with sand.
A valley or river channel was cut through them, probably during the gradual upheaval of the country, and the hollow became afterwards the receptacle of the comparatively modern freshwater beds A, B, C, and D. They may well represent a silted up river-channel, which remained for a time in the state of a lake or mere, and in which the black peaty mass B accumulated by a very slow growth over the gravel of the river-bed A. In B we find remains of some of the same plants which were enumerated as common in the ancient lignite in 3 prime, such as the yellow water-lily and hornwort, together with some freshwater shells which occur in the same fluvio-marine series 3 prime.
The Mobile River, forty miles long, and formed by the Alabama and Tombigby, is but the estuary at the head of Mobile Bay, silted up with detritus by the entering streams. Several miles wide, it incloses numerous marshy islands in its many channels.
Between Capes Risout and Merbat we found the sites of ruined towns of considerable extent in no less than seven different points, though at the two capes where now is the only anchorage, there are no ruins to be seen, proving, as we afterwards verified for ourselves, that anchorage of a superior nature existed in the neighbourhood in antiquity, which has since become silted up, but which anciently must have afforded ample protection for the boats which came for the frankincense trade.
The same thing then occurred in the south. The new river and lake were silted up and the water returned northwards. Thus the water swung repeatedly from north to south, but of course many hundreds of years elapsed between the vibrations. At the present day the lake lies in the southern part of the desert; it is almost entirely overgrown with reeds, and the poplar woods grow only by the river.
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