I picked this up because I am, after a childhood of Indiana Jones and steady diet of Victorian-era explorers, an avowed Egypt-nut. When my wife and I went there, it was a trip of a lifetime and we always talk about going back... Which would be the price of another trip of a lifetime. ;)
Until then, I have books. This one chronicles one man's journey from the White Nile's origin at Lake Victoria aaall the way to Rosetta on the Mediterranean coast. I was glad he spent a lot of time detailing the southern reaches of his journey, and I was expecting some Latin-related stuff later on... But then I came across this not half-way in:
"We were approaching the Sudd. For thousands of years this giant swamp--more than fifty thousand square miles, as big as England--had repelled invaders from the lands to the north. The British explorer Samuel Baker described it as "a vast sea of papyrus ferns and rotting vegetation, and in that fetid heat there is a spawning tropical life that can hardly have altered very much since the beginning of the world." In AD 61 the Roman emperor Nero, who controlled Egypt, dispatched troops up the river to find the source of the Nile. They returned with reports of "immense marshes" that were too dense for all by the smallest of one-man canoes."
Imagine... A physical barrier that stopped the Romans. Not the Alps, Pyrenees, Rhine, Danube or even the deserts of the Middle East... But a swamp.
Citation:
Dan Morrison, The Black Nile, New York: Viking Penguin, 2010, p. 132.
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