Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas · Jules Verne, 1870
Is the Arabian Tunnel in Twenty Thousand Leagues real?
No· invented
Verne made it up. The Nautilus rides it from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean in under twenty minutes; the real Suez Canal opened in 1869.
From the bookReal world
The Nautilus sails up the Red Sea, which has no way out to the north. Nemo explains: there is a passage under the Isthmus of Suez, which he calls the Arabian Tunnel. It runs from under Suez to the Gulf of Pelusium, in solid rock just fifty metres below the sand. He found it by catching fish in the Red Sea, tagging them, and catching them again off the coast of Syria.
Nemo takes the wheel himself. The current carries the Nautilus through, and at 10:35 he turns to Aronnax and says: “The Mediterranean.” It took less than twenty minutes. Suez to Port Said is about 145 km in a straight line, so the Nautilus would have done more than 400 km an hour.
There's no such tunnel. Verne wrote the book in 1869–70, just as the Suez Canal opened, 164 km long then and about 193 km today, and the canal is how real ships still get from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean.
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