CHAPTER II 
THE DESERTS 
(i) The Eastern Gateway of Sudan 
The Sudan, from whichever direction it is approached, 
lies beset by deserts—by ioo-league deserts. Should 
the traveller elect to ascend the Nile from Egypt, he 
finds himself confronted at the frontier by 500 miles 
of Sahara, to be traversed ere he reaches Khartoum. 
This is the Nubian Desert—“Devastation, Desolation, 
Damnation,” is Steevens’s terse trilogy thereof, and no 
more apt description need be sought. For this Nubian 
Desert, lying wholly north of tropical rainfalls, is 
absolutely waterless, and all who have witnessed its 
appalling sterility will agree with Steevens’s anathema. 1 
These Nubian Deserts I have endeavoured to describe 
in a subsequent chapter—“the Northern Gateway of 
Sudan ”—so will here turn to the alternative route by way 
of the Red Sea, or what I call “the Eastern Gateway.” 
A short ten days’ voyage from Marseilles (or seventeen 
days by long-sea from London) lands the traveller at 
our magnificent new British harbour of Port Sudan, 
with its mile-long quays and modern equipment calculated 
to handle even the expanding exports from Sudan for 
many a year to come. Still even here, he is separated 
from Khartoum by 575 miles of sterile mountain ranges 
and Saharan wastes—once a serious obstacle ; but to-day 
British enterprise has provided a desert-railway, with 
1 With Kitchener to Khartoum , by G. W. Steevens. 
