Harkhuf’s way to Yam [Upper Nubia] lay over what in later days was the infamous Darb al-Arba’in. First came seventy five miles of easy going…then followed a desert march of 160 miles over sand to Sheb on the present Egypt-Sudan border. Probably it was at Sheb that Harkhuf “found the Chieftan of Yam gone to the land of Temeh [Southern Libyan Desert] as far as the western corner of heaven. I went forth in pursuit of him.”
-G.W. Murray, Harkhuf’s Third Journey, The Geographical Journal, March 1965
Harkhuf was the Old Kingdom Pharaoh Pepy II’s trail boss sent to Yam, as his tomb inscription records, on the reverse route that the camel trader Hajj Bashir sent his trail boss KhairAllah to Cairo 4,250 years later. But things apparently went off course for Harkhuf, who had to chase after the Chieftan of Yam far and wide into the Libyan Desert towards the wilds of Dar al-Kababish. Would that KhairAllah had been along on that trip too, to show the Khawaja his homeland as he did to me.