We Had Seen The Atbara A Bed Of Glaring Sand - A
Mere Continuation Of The Burning Desert That Surrounded Its
Course - Fringed By A Belt Of Withered Trees, Like A Monument Sacred To
The Memory Of A Dead River.
We had seen the sudden rush of waters when,
in the still night, the mysterious stream had invaded the dry bed and
swept all before it like an awakened giant; we knew at that moment "the
rains were falling in Abyssinia," although the sky above us was without
a cloud.
We had subsequently witnessed that tremendous rainfall, and
seen the Atbara at its grandest flood. We had traced each river and
crossed each tiny stream that fed the mighty Atbara from the
mountain-chain, and we now, after our long journey, forded the Atbara in
its infancy, hardly knee-deep, over its rocky bed of about sixty yards'
width, and camped in the little village of Toganai, on the rising ground
upon the opposite side. It was evening, and we sat upon an angarep among
the lovely hills that surrounded us, and looked down upon the Atbara for
the last time, as the sun sank behind the rugged mountain of Ras el Feel
(the elephant's head). Once more I thought of that wonderful river Nile,
that could flow forever through the exhausting deserts of sand, while
the Atbara, during the summer months, shrank to a dry skeleton, although
the powerful affluents, the Salaam and the Settite, never ceased to
flow; every drop of their waters was evaporated by the air and absorbed
by the desert sand in the bed of the Atbara, two hundred miles above its
junction with the Nile!
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