1 Chapter : 1 Jonathan Swift : Gulliver's Travels Introduction to Jonathan Swift and his age : Jonathan Swift was born of English parents in Dublin in 1667. Unfortunately his father died before his birth and they had to depend on the financial aid they received from relatives.
At 3.6 million square miles (9.4 million square kilometers), the Sahara, which is Arabic for The Great Desert, engulfs most of North Africa. The desert covers large sections of Algeria, Chad, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, Niger, Western Sahara, Sudan and Tunisia.This is the image many people have of the Sahara: a vast sea of sand dunes.The terrain is actually quite varied.alf of the Sahara receives less than an inch of rain per year, and the rest receives up to 4 inches (10 centimeters) per year. The infrequent rain is usually torrential. The highest peak in the Sahara is the volcano Emi Koussi (11,204 feet or 3,415 meters) in the Tibesti Mountains in northern Chad.
The Sahara, the world's largest desert, encroaches on the western shore of the Nile River. Other deserts lie to the Nile's east. Egypt's location within the world's driest region helped protect it from invaders throughout the centuries. Even today, the world around the Nile is quite barren. Outside of the narrow swath of greenery next to the river, there is sand as far as the eye can see. To the Nile's west exists the giant Sahara Desert, the largest desert in the world. From north to south, the Sahara is between 800 and 1,200 miles wide; it stretches over 3,000 miles from east to west. The total area of the Sahara is more than 3,500,000 square miles. It's the world's biggest sandbox.