Page:Africa by Élisée Reclus, Volume 1.djvu/81

 Albuquerque, who asked the King of Portugal to send him workmen from Madeira to assist him in making a new bed for the Nile to the Red Sea, Theodore, "king of

kings," boasted that he would divert the Mareb into the Barka, in order to create a famine in Egypt and compel the Khedive to capitulate.

During the dry season, the Atbara, unlike the Blue Nile, fails to reach the main stream. Its bed, 440 yards broad, is completely dry; "a desert within a desert," it is merely a waste of shimmering sands, to which the distant mirage gives the