Nubian Desert

“Instead of laboring along the nine hundred miles of the curve of the Nile between Wadi Halfa and Berber, and hauling his force past three of the six Cataracts between Egypt and Khartoum, he would lay 400 miles of track, 230 of them cutting across the waterless Nubian Desert to Abu Hamed, just north of Berber.”

Simon & Schuster: Three Empires on the Nile