Mr Bygott said the sea was "quite mountainous" and the lifeboat crew had "certainly" saved their lives, rowing over the rocks to pluck them to safety.

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Flanked by the mountainous Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, the slender state descends from tea plantation-cloaked slopes to golden beaches that edge into vivid blue seas.

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Fresh from constructing a sea-level canal through the flat Egyptian sand, de Lesseps was determined, without having set foot in Panama and after only the vaguest of topographical studies, that his project through the mountainous central American isthmus would also be a sea-level canal, requiring no locks to cope with changes in altitude.

ECONOMIST: The Panama Canal