Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/354





HE term Nubia, applied to the country which lies beyond Egypt, has no precise geographical sense; nor can any meaning be attached to it from a political or administrative point of view. It probably had once a real ethnological value, at a period when the Nubas, not yet driven back by other populations, were the only dwellers on the banks of the Nile throughout a great part of its course. But wars and invasions have for a long tune modified these former conditions. At the present time the term Nubia is variously employed in current language. At one time it is applied merely to the region of the Wady-Nuba, which comprises that part of the river’s course Which is broken up by the thousand rapids of the second cataract, whilst at another it is used to designate the whole of the region bounded north by the rapids of Assuan, south by the junction of the two Niles, east by the Red Sea, and west by the trackless desert.

The natural geographical limits of Nubia, on the southern side, seem to be formed by the junction of the Nile and Atbara, and by the route from Berber to Suakin. Nubia, thus bounded in the direction of the Abyssinian plateaux, does not include any of those regions which are connected with Abyssinia, properly so-called, by their mountains, hydrographic system, or populations. Its approximate area within these limits and on the western side as far as the twenty-seventh degree of east longitude, is estimated at 100,000 square miles, with a population of about 1,000,000. According to Rüppell, the arable land of Nubia, limited by the desert, is not more than 1,300 square miles in extent, and all the inhabitants are concentrated within this fertile riverain tract.

The region, some hundreds of miles broad, which north of the Atbara and Barka separates the valley of the Nile from the Red Sea coast, is commanded by chains of heights, similar to those traversing the territory of the Hadendoas, Hallengas, and Bazens; but these chains, separated from the Abyssinian spurs by the deep breaches and by the nearly always dried-up beds of numerous wadies, constitute a special orthographic system. Whilst the Abyssinian chain, although abruptly terminated by the deep bed of the Red Sea, reappears as it were in Arabia as the Yemen uplands, the mountains of the Bisharin country develop their axis