Le 8 juillet nous etions a Dal, en tete d’une longue cataracte que les geographes ne comptent pas, bien qu’elle soit plus longue et qu’elle presente des points plus difficiles a franchir dans cette saison que celle dite troisieme cataracte…Le pays qui s’etendait devant nous se nomme Batan-el-Adjar (le ventre des pierres), nom parfaitement merite…On n’y trouve que quelques miserables hameaux dont les habitants cultivent d’etroits parcelles de terre enclavees dans les rochers que laissent les caprices du fleuve…Le pays est pittoresque mais d’un bien triste aspect; ce ne sont que sables et rochers nus…Un homme auquel je demandais si les sables comme ceux qui nous entouraient s’etendaient loin au couchant, me repondit: Jusq’au bout du monde! C’est-a-dire qu’il n’en connaissait pas la fin.
-Voyage en Ethiopie au Soudan orientale et dans la Nigritie (1847 a1854), Pierre Tremaux
I am happy this cataract didn’t get a number; that way, even Nile River completionists will likely pass it by. They’ve already built dams at the First, which flooded the Second, and the Fourth, and have plans one day for the Third. The Fifth and the Sixth, the one closest to Khartoum called the Sabaloka Gorge which makes for a pleasant day trip lounging on its shaded overlook, for the moment are in the clear.
I spent the night on both trips in homes, neither one miserable, on Dal’s left bank. In 1984 I had a pleasant chat by lantern light in English with a man who knew Beirut when a student and was shot by an invading American marine. In 1988 we stayed with a friend of KhairAllah, who admired my Kordofani donkey pad so I gave it to him. Why would an old man like Shaheen want to know how far the Dal sands extended to the west. To the very end of the world, or only as far as his newly upholstered donkey could carry him? He knew geography well enough not to go that far off river just to find out.