50 NORTH-EAST AFEICA. 



siderably less than 4,000 feet, and here its banks begin to be fringed by^ a tropical 

 vegetation. On descending from the surrounding mountains, which are swept by 

 cold winds, the sensation is like that felt on entering a hothouse. 



The Atbara. 



After its escape from the region of the plateaux, the Takkaze resumes its 

 westerly course, and at last reaches the plain through a series of rugged gorges. 

 Here it takes the name of the Se tit, and is joined by the Atbara, which is much 

 less in volume and hardly half its length ; but the mean direction of its valley, 

 beginning immediately west of Lake Tsana, is the same as that of the united 

 streams. The Atbara, like the Mississippi on joining the yellow and turbid waters 

 of the powerful Missouri, gives its name to the hydrographie system ; the Goang, 

 one of the tributaries of the Takkaze, rises in the north in the depression of Lake 

 Tsana, from which it is separated only by a ridge 165 feet high. Below the 

 confluence the Atbara, which retains the ancient name given it by Ptolemy under 

 the form of Astaboras, gradually diminishes in volume, as does also its former 

 affluent, the Mareb, which in its upper course describes one of those large semi- 

 circular curves so characteristic of the Abyssinian rivers. In fact, the Mareb, or the 

 " River of the West," as it is called by the Abyssinians from the direction of its 

 course, may be said to have ceased to be an affluent of the Atbara. Called the 

 " Sona " in its middle and " Gash " in its lower course, where it is only an inter- 

 mittent stream, it flows northwards parallel with the Atbara, and runs out in the 

 alluvial lands before reaching its former outlet, called by the Hadendoa nomads 

 " Gash-da," i.e. " Mouth of the Gash." On visiting the country in 1864, Mun- 

 zinger found that its bed had not been once flooded for twenty years. This change 

 in the local hydrography doubtless arises from the irrigation works constructed on 

 the left bank of the Gash, Embanked on this side, the river flows to the right, 

 eating away its eastern and highest cliiïs. Its course, formerly at right angles, 

 now becomes parallel to the Atbara ; but as it flows northwards it finally runs dry 

 in the sands. In 1840, Ahmed Pasha, the Egyptian conqueror, tried again to 

 divert the Gash westwards into the Atbara, but his embankment was undermined 

 by the riverain population of the lower plain. Till recently the river Barka, or 

 Baraka, flowing into the swamps on the Red Sea coast not far from Suakin, was 

 also supposed to belong to the Nile basin through a branch of the Mareb. This 

 tradition diifers little from that related by Strabo, according to which a branch of 

 the Astaboras flowed to the Red Sea. The hypothesis may perhaps be partly due 

 to a confusion of names, for the plain stretching east of the Mareb towards the 

 Atbara is called Barka, or Baraka, a term also applied to the channel flowing east- 

 wards. However this be, the Aximiite Ethiopians, and after them the xibyssinians, 

 who long identified the true Nile with their Takkaze, fancied for centuries that it 

 would be easy to divert their river into the sea and thus deprive Egypt of the water 

 required for its crops. This illusion, however, was also entertained by foreigners, 

 and is referred to by Ariosto in his " Orlando Furioso." Repeating the threat of 



