Nubia

a district of Africa extending along both sides of the Nile from Egypt to Abyssinia. It is a region rather than a country. It may be said to begin at the lower or first cataract of the Nile and to extend to the junction of the Blue and the White Nile. It is an indefinite part of that indefinite region called by the ancients Ethiopia. It contains a population of about 1,000,000 people, under the joint rule of Great Britain and Egypt. Nubia begins at the west at the confines of the Libyan Desert and extends eastward to the Red Sea. The Nubian Desert is between the Nile and the Red Sea. The Nile has but one tributary, Atbara, in Nubia. A vivid description of Nubia, taken in the narrow sense of the immediate valley of the Nile, is given by Conan Doyle:

It is a singular country, this Nubia. Varying in breadth from a few miles to as many yards, it extends in a thin, green, palm-fringed strip upon either side of the broad, coffee-colored river. Beyond it there stretches on the Libyan bank a savage and illimitable desert, extending to the whole breadth of Africa. On the other side an equally desolate wilderness is bounded only by the distant Red Sea. Between these two huge and barren expanses Nubia writhes like a green sandworm along the course of the river. Here and there it disappears altogether, and the Nile runs between black and sun-cracked hills, with the orange drift-sand lying like glaciers in their valleys. Everywhere one sees traces of vanished races and submerged civilizations. Grotesque graves dot the hills or stand up against the skyline: pyramidal graves, tumulus graves, rock graves,-everywhere, graves. And, occasionally, as the boat rounds a rocky point, one sees a deserted city up above,-houses, walls, battlements, with the sun shining through the empty window squares.