THE NORTHERN GATEWAY OF SUDAN 401 
It is when the homeward-bound traveller quits the 
Nile at Abu-Hamed (559 kilometres north of Khartoum), 
and thence cuts directly across the chord of the river’s 
great western bend that the acme of desolation is reached. 
No adequate adjectives exist, superlatives sound paltry 
—even had the supply not been exhausted in attempting 
the previous description. Nothing short of a personal 
view can convey a living sense of the hideous outrage 
of these 232 miles of Nubian Desert. 
Throughout the whole of that distance reigns a 
solitude and a deathly silence that is speechful. Horizon 
succeeds horizon, each in turn a sweeping, swelling, sun- 
scorched void, unbroken save by mountainous masses of 
wind-sculptured sand, or by protruding jebels of plutonic 
rock, black as Erebus; but never a vestige of water, or 
of life, or of green thing. I find in my diary one note 
of a solitary thorn-tree, alone and leafless, mocking the 
deadly spaces. 
Abhorrent to every human sense, there yet exists a 
sort of abstract fascination in this “howling wilderness.” 
That morning I awaited the dawn, watched the cruel 
sun rise over the rim, watched all day till he dipped in a 
panoply of hues that for brief moments glorified—almost 
beautified—the whole horrid abomination of desolation. 
At intervals during the transit the whole earth within 
the circlet of vision was sand, sand, sand—nothing but 
glowing, glistening, red-hot sand; anon over the rim 
peered the blue outlines of distant mountains, perhaps 
100 miles away by the Red Sea. 
The ten “stations” have no names—only numbers. 
There are no places in the desert capable of bearing a 
distinctive name—they are merely water-tanks for the 
supply of the engines, the water brought by other engines 
for the purpose. From “Station No. 6” there branches off 
a side-track to a gold-mine. More important, however, 
than problematic treasure is the rather less problematic 
fact that the big Barbary wild sheep (Ovis lervid) may 
