The country everywhere presents an arid, uninteresting aspect; drifting sands cover the land; there are no trees or anything green to relieve the eye from the glare…It is truly a land of banishment, cut off by deserts and a river of cataracts from the civilized portions of the world.
-A Walk Across Africa, James A. Grant, 1864, Description of Khartoum
Grant certainly had it backwards, thinking of Khartoum as the place cut off and banished, not the upriver Sudd’s swamps, sumps, and sinkholes he’d just spent a year and a half fighting his way through. From Khartoum it was an easy march to the Meroitic temple of Musawwarat and the Roman kiosk of Naqa, midway on the well traveled ancient road between Axum and Egypt and on to the seats of Classical Civilization.