Umbrageous

A Tiny Bit of Geography

I was fooling around with my atlas, looking for cities at about the same latititude as Jacksonville, Florida, and made a small discovery:  Iraq's port city of Basra lies at about the same distance from the equator as Jacksonville, that is, at about 30° N. Latitude.

This led me to make a few other comparisons.  I'm not terribly knowledgable about geography, but I am curious.

Iraq lies between about 29° and 37° N.  Comparing this to the southeastern U.S. — where I am — these are about the same latitudes as those of New Smyrna Beach, Florida, in the south, and Norfolk, Virginia, in the north.

Iraq's capitol city of Baghdad lies at about the same latitiude as Charleston, South Carolina, or about 33° N.

The area of Iraq is about 172,000 sq. miles, or a bit less than the combined area of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia.

To make it visual, I hurriedly fudged together the crude overlay map of Iraq on top of the southeastern U.S. seen to the right.  You'll have to imagine the lines of latitude connecting the two.

(I do mean crude.  I wasn't able to find maps of the same scale and projection, and I'm certainly not a cartographer.  The overlay was resized until it stretched roughly the right distance north-to-south, from Norfolk to New Smyrna Beach, on the U.S. map.)

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"Umbrageous" is an adjective meaning shaded, shady, or shadowy, as in:

Suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual; for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labryinth of stone:  and yet within his body was something other — other than this umbrageous legacy.

—Mervyn Peake,
in Gormenghast