For the wretched slaves who were harried along the infamous Darb al-Arba’in, the journey would have seemed endless. To this day the skeletons of camels and men lying half hidden in the sand attest to the severity of this long walk from northwest Sudan to Egypt and the Nile.
-When the Sahara Was Green, Martin Williams
Funny. Da’ūd, Mustapha, Nedu, and I never felt wretched or harried on the Darb. We were there because we chose to be and considered ourselves lucky to have been invited by Hajj Bashir and accompanied by KhairAllah, long walking in the footsteps of Khawajas who had made the trip before us, following Pepi II’s scout Harkuf in the Third Milennium BCE and only a few others after. Nor did we see any men buried in the sand. Plenty of broken ostrich eggs, too thin to be bits of human skull. No half sunk Ozymandias, no Cambysian soldiers from the lost army. Just camel bones and bird shells.