Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/168

 rounding lands westwards to the Nilotic plains, and eastwards to the shores of the Red Sea, in its ordinary usage the terra 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 projecting to the neighbourhood of the Red Sea, from which they are separated by a narrow strip of coastlands. Eastwards the rugged Tigre, Lasta, and Shoa highlands 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 the Masai country. Still, depressions are known to exist in this region affording easy communication from the Nile Valley through 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 Kaffa 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 irregidar 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.

Separated from the surrounding countries by the relief of its plateaux and mountains, Ethiopia also differs from them in its climate, vegetation, fauna, inhabitants, and history. 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.