United States or Sierra Leone ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
As you will see, it has its source in the overflow from Lake Victoria Nyanza, when it flows in a generally northern direction for many hundreds of miles, receiving several tributaries, such as the River Sobat and the Bahr-el-Ghazal, whose waters, combining with the Bahr-el-Abiad, or White Nile, as it is called, maintain the steady constant flow of the river.
A few years later Edward Rüppell devoted seven or eight years to the exploration of Nubia, Sennaar, Kordofan, and Abyssinia in 1824, he ascended the White Nile for more than sixty leagues above its mouth. Lastly, in 1836 to 1838, Joseph Russegger, superintendent of the Austrian mines, visited the lower portion of the course of the Bahr-el-Abiad.
A lake, nearly as large as the Victoria Nyanza, once covered the marshy plain where the Bahr-el-Abiad unites with the Sobat and with the Bahr-el-Ghazal.
Pressing on in a southerly direction between the 15th and 16th degrees of N. lat., Cailliaud next identified the mouth of the Bahr-el-Abiad, or White Nile, visited the ruins of Saba, the mouth of the Rahad, the ancient Astosaba, Sennaar, the river Gologo, the Fazoele country, and the Toumat, a tributary of the Nile, finally reaching the Singue country between the two branches of the river.
The Libyan Desert, above the junction of the two principal branches of the Nile at Khartum, is so much higher than the level of the river below that point, that there is no reason to believe a new channel for the united waters of the two streams 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 tributaries are supposed to communicate in the rainy season with branches of great rivers flowing in quite another direction.
How much of this vast triangular continent of Africa was known in the seventeenth century? Nothing but the coasts, it will be said. A mistake. From the earliest times the two branches of the Nile, the Astapus and the Bahr-el-Abiad, had been known to the ancients.
Khartoum lies on the left bank of the Blue Nile Bahr-el-Azrak rather more than three miles south of its confluence with the White Nile Bahr-el-Abiad at the northern point of the Isle of Tuti.
Word Of The Day