The Blue Nile (Amharic: ዓባይ?; transliterated: ʿAbbai, but pronounced Abbai, Arabic: النيل الأزرق An Nīl al Āzraq) is a river originating at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. With the White Nile, the river is one of the two major tributaries of the Nile. The upper reaches of the river is called the Abbay in Ethiopia, where it is considered holy by many, and is believed to be the River Gihon mentioned as flowing out of the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2.
Read more about Blue Nile: Course, Water Flow, European Exploration
Famous quotes containing the words blue and/or nile:
“It was beginning winter,
An in-between time,
The landscape still partly brown:
The bones of weeds kept swinging in the wind,
Above the blue snow.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)
“Hard by the lilied Nile I saw
A duskish river dragon stretched along.
The brown habergeon of his limbs enamelled
With sanguine alamandines and rainy pearl:
And on his back there lay a young one sleeping,
No bigger than a mouse;”
—Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803–1849)