Health abroad : a medical handbook of travel / by C. Harford Battersby [and others] ; edited by Edmund Hobhouse.

Date:
1899
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Health abroad : a medical handbook of travel / by C. Harford Battersby [and others] ; edited by Edmund Hobhouse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The heights of this range are greatest in the western extremity in Marocco, where the Great Atlas range rises to perpetual snow level, which is 11,000 ft. for this latitude, and Tamjurt is probably 14,500 ft. The general elevation falls rapidly as we proceed eastwards, until the hills are of quite a low elevation in Tunis. The southern ridge, called by the French the border range, descends abruptly to the south or Saharan plains in the south of Algiers. Proceeding eastward of Tunis, along the North African coast, we come to the sparsely populated Tripolitana ; here the climate is drier than in the hilly country we have just noted, and the whole of the seaboard from the Gulf of Gabes to Egypt may be considered an essential part of the Sahara. We have now met the northern limit of the vast rainless, or nearly rainless, zone of arid plateaux and deserts which stretch across the northern division of the eastern hemisphere from the Pacific coast to the Atlantic, where the rain is less than 10 inches. In the African portion of this area from the Mediterranean to the Sudan it is much less than 5 inches on the average. Onwards towards Egypt, and through Egypt to the Suez Canal, we are actually in the Sahara climatically, the cultivation of the Egyptian delta being almost entirely dependent upon the Nile. Everywhere along this seaboard the rainfall diminishes very rapidly as we proceed inland. At Alex- andria the rainfall is inches, at Cairo this has decreased to 14 inch, and further south at Luxor and Assouan it is hardly measurable. The same may be noted in Algiers and Marocco; the rainfall in Algiers is about 30 inches, whereas at Biskra, 200 miles S.E., it has fallen to 64 inches, and at El Golea, 450 miles further S., it has fallen to a little over 1 inch. If we take the route to the Sudan from Tripoli southwards through Mourzonk, this
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