Editing Kubla Khan (section)

=== Mount Abora ===
[[File:ET Tigray asv2018-01 img01 Debre Damo surroundings.jpg|thumb|[[Debre Damo]], an [[Amba (landform)|amba]] (flat-topped mountain) in Ethiopia similar to [[Amba Geshen]] (Mount Amara)]]

In the Crewe manuscript (the earlier unpublished version of the poem), the Abyssinian maid is singing of Mount Amara, rather than Abora. Mount Amara is a real mountain, today called [[Amba Geshen]], located in the [[Amhara Region]] of modern [[Ethiopia]], formerly known as the [[Abyssinian Empire]]. It was a natural fortress, and was the site of the royal treasury and the royal prison. The sons of the Emperors of Abyssinia, except for the heir, were held prisoner there, to prevent them from staging a coup against their father, until the Emperor's death.

Mount Amara was visited between 1515 and 1521 by Portuguese priest, explorer and diplomat [[Francisco Alvares]] (1465–1541), who was on a mission to meet the Christian king of Ethiopia. His description of Mount Amara was published in 1540, and appears in ''Purchas, his Pilgrimes'', the book Coleridge was reading before he wrote "Kubla Khan".{{NoteTag|Alvares wrote: <br /> The custome is that all the male child of the Kings, except the Heires, as soone as they be brought up, they send them presendly to a very great Rock, which stands in the province of Amara, and there they pass all their life, and never come out from thence, except the King which reignith departeth their life without Heires.<ref>Purchas, VII, p.&nbsp;383.</ref>}} Mount Amara also appears in Milton's [[Paradise Lost]], where it is "by some suppos'd / True Paradise under the Ethiop line,"<ref>Milton, ''Paradise Lost'', Book 4, lines 280–287.</ref> where Abyssinian kings keep their children guarded.<ref>Fruman 1971 p. 344</ref>

Mount Amara is in the same region as [[Lake Tana]], the source of the [[Blue Nile]] river. Ethiopian tradition says that the Blue Nile is the River [[Gihon]] of the Bible, one of the four rivers that flow out of the [[Garden of Eden]] in the [[Book of Genesis]], which says that Gihon flows through the [[Kingdom of Kush]], the Biblical name for Ethiopia and Sudan. In fact the Blue Nile is very far from the other three rivers mentioned in Genesis 2:10–14, but this belief led to the connection in 18th and 19th century English literature between Mount Amara and Paradise.<ref>Edward Ullendorff, ''Ethiopia and the Bible'' (Oxford: University Press for the British Academy, 1968), p. 2.</ref>