124 NOETH-EAST AEEICA. 



rounding lands westwards to the Nilotic plains, and eastwards to the shores of the 

 Red Sea, in its ordinary usage the term Abyssinia is specially employed in a 

 political sense, its limits being indicated by the authority of the "King of Kings," 



The word Ethiopia has a still wider sense. From the geographical standpoint 

 its natural frontiers are traced by the elevations, which at the same time serve as 

 boundary lines between the surrounding floras, faunas, and populations. Speaking 

 generally, the whole triangular space, rising to an elevation of over 3,000 feet, 

 between the Red Sea and the Nile, may be called Ethiopia proper. On all sides 

 the exterior escarpments of the plateau indicate the zone of transition between the 

 Ethiopian and surrounding lands. To the north they consist of those spurs pro- 

 jecting to the neighbourhood of the Red Sea, from which they are separated by a 

 narrow strip of coastlands. Eastwards the rugged Tigré, Lasta, and Shoa high- 

 lands are abruptly limited by uneven plains stretching seawards, which appear to 

 have formerly been partly submerged. Wadies and marshes skirt the foot of the 

 hills, like those channels which encircle the foot of recently upheaved rocks. To 

 the west the declivities are less precipitous ; the highlands, breaking into ridges 

 and headlands, fall in successive stages merging at last in the undulating plains, 

 but reappearing here and there in isolated crags and masses in the midst of the 

 alluvial strata. To the south the natural boundaries of Ethiopia are less distinctly 

 defined, the plateau extending in this direction towards the uplands of tlie Masai 

 country. Still, depressions are known to exist in this region affording easy com- 

 munication from the Nile Valley througb the Sobat to the lands draining through 

 the Juba to the Indian Ocean. 



Until these little-known regions have been thoroughly explored, it will be 

 impossible to accurately calculate the extent of Ethiopia in its wider sense. All 

 we know is that, in their present political limits, Abyssinia and Shoa cover an area 

 of about 80,000 square miles, or considerably less than half that of France. The 

 Kafia country and part of the region occupied by the Gallas and other tribes, as 

 far as the water-parting between the Sobat and Juba, should be added to these 

 countries as natural geographical dependencies. The lowlands, ancient political 

 dependencies of the kingdom of Ethiopia, extend east of the Abyssinian mountains 

 towards the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden over an area nearly equal to that of 

 Abyssinia properly so-called. The whole of the region comprised between the 

 Nile, the Takka steppes, the seacoast from Suakin to Zeila, and the irregular 

 water-parting between the basins of the Awash, the Blue Nile, the Sobat, and the 

 tributaries of the Indian Ocean, has a superficial area exceeding 240,000 square 

 miles. Its population may be approximately estimated at about 9,000,000. 



Historic Retrospect. 



Separated from the surrounding countries by the relief of its plateaux and moun- 

 tains, Ethiopia also differs from them in its climate, vegetation, fauna, inhabitants, 

 and histor5^ In this vast continent, where the people elsewhere intermingle like the 

 waters of the sea, it rises like a vast highland citadel, constituting a world apart. 



