There is something very imposing to the imagination in the idea of an iron track laid in the pathless sands, over which long trains move swifter than the swift dromedaries, carrying burdens greater than the longest caravans.
-From Egypt to Japan, Henry Martyn Field, 1877
If you can get yourself to Kerma on the tarmac, as I did once, you will see a steam locomotive abandoned on a side track off the narrow gauge laid south from the Second Cataract by the British Army to rescue General Gordon. It never got past Kerma, and most Kermāwīs have forgotten how it got there in the first place, seeing it something like a cargo cult barrel washed onto a South Sea beach, but these days much less meaningful now that camels pass on the opposite beach, the Nile’s western bank, direct to Cairo.