DIVERSION OF THE NILE. 
529 
century the Ethiopians dammed the river, and, for a whole 
year, cut off its waters from Egypt. The probable explana¬ 
tion of this story is to be found in a season of extreme drought, 
such as have sometimes occurred in the valley of the Nile. 
About the beginning of the sixteenth century, Albuquerque 
the “ Terrible ” revived the scheme of turning the Nile into 
the Red Sea, with the hope of destroying the transit trade 
through Egypt by way of Kosseir. In 1525 the King of Por¬ 
tugal was requested by the Emperor of Abyssinia to send him 
engineers for that purpose ; a successor of that prince threat¬ 
ened to attempt the project about the year 1700, and even as 
late as the French occupation of Egypt, the possibility of 
driving out the intruder by this means was suggested in 
England. 
It cannot be positively affirmed that the diversion of the 
waters of the Nile to the Red Sea is impossible. In the chain 
of mountains which separates the two valleys, Brown found a 
deep depression or wadi, extending from the one to the other, 
at no great elevation above the bed of the river. The Libyan 
desert is so much higher than the Nile below the junction of 
the two principal branches at Khartum, that there is no rea¬ 
son to believe a new channel for their united waters could be 
found in that direction ; but the Bahr-el-Abiad flows through, 
if it does not rise in, a great table land, and some of its tribu¬ 
taries are supposed to communicate in the rainy season with 
branches of great rivers flowing in quite another direction. 
Hence it is probable that a portion at least of the waters of 
this great arm of the Nile—and perhaps a quantity the ab¬ 
straction of which would be sensibly felt in Egypt—might be 
sent to the Atlantic by the Niger, lost in the inland lakes of 
Central Africa, or employed to fertilize the Libyan sand 
wastes. 
Admitting the possibility of turning the whole river into 
the Red Sea, let us consider the probable effect of the change. 
First and most obvious is the total destruction of the fertility 
of Middle and Lower Egypt, the conversion of that part of the 
valley into a desert, and the extinction of its imperfect civiliza- 
34 
