page_title: Kubla Khan
section_title: Mount Abora
hierarchical_section_title: Kubla Khan / Sources / Mount Abora
caption_attribution_description: English: View of Debre Damo hill in Tigray Region, Ethiopia Русский: Вид на гору Дабрэ-Дамо, регион Тыграй, Эфиопия
context_page_description: Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream: A Fragment is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797 and published in 1816. According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Xanadu, the summer palace of the Mongol ruler and Emperor of China Kublai Khan. Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the dream until he was interrupted by "a person from Porlock". The poem could not be completed according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, at the prompting of Lord Byron, it was published.
  The poem is vastly different in style from other poems written by Coleridge. The first stanza of the poem describes Khan's pleasure dome built alongside a sacred river fed by a powerful fountain. The second stanza of the poem is the narrator's response to the power and effects of an Abyssinian maid's song, which enraptures him but leaves him unable to act on her inspiration unless he could hear her once again.
context_section_description: In the Crewe manuscript (the earlier unpublished version of the poem), the Abyssinian maid is singing of Mount Amara, rather than Abora.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".
  Mount Amara also appears in Milton's Paradise Lost: 
  Near where Abessian Kings their issue Guard,
  
  Mount Amara, though this by some suppos'd
  
  True Paradise under the Ethiop line.
  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.
caption: Debre Damo, an amba (flat-topped mountain) in Ethiopia similar to Amba Geshen (Mount Amara)
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