“It’s the great caravan route,” said Mansoor…Baedeker says that it has been disused on account of the cessation of all trade which followed the rise of the Dervishes, but that it used to be the main road by which the skins and gums of Darfur found their way down to Lower Egypt…Weary camels and weary riders dragged on together towards their miserable goal.
-The Tragedy of the Korosko, Arthur Conan Doyle
In 1895 Sir Arthur did what a lot of his compatriots were doing in the years between Gordon’s death in 1885 and Lord Kitchener’s 1898 reconquest of the Sudan- embark with his wife on a Thomas Cook steamer in Aswan for Wadi Halfa at the Second Cataract, where he climbed the Abu Sir lookout rock to peer to the south deep into Dervish-held No Man’s Land and give himself a little British frisson. And when he published The Tragedy of the Korosko in 1897, he gave his female readers an even chillier chill. English ladies taken captive by the Mahdi, O my!
When David and I were on the Way in 1984, it took us far to the west of Wadi Halfa, on the opposite bank and far out of sight. We didn’t see them and they didn’t see us. We were weary, the camels were weary, but our goal was certainly not miserable. In Aswan I was looking forward to a hot shower, a shave, and a big box of basbousa. Elementary, KhairAllah, Bilal, Masood, Rabih, and all the others.