Sudan

Sudan is built around the Nile. The White Nile, flowing up from the south, and the Blue Nile, coming down from the Ethiopian highlands, meet at Khartoum, and the united river winds on through Nubia, making its great S-bend through the desert and over its cataracts. West of the river lie the plains of Kordofan and Darfur and the volcanic Jebel Marra; to the east the Red Sea Hills drop to Port Sudan. The north is almost rainless, the south a land of summer rains and savannah.

Nubia was the land of Kush, whose kings ruled Egypt as its Twenty-fifth Dynasty and later built more pyramids at Meroë than Egypt ever did. Christian Nubian kingdoms lasted into the late Middle Ages, and Islam spread with Arab traders and the Funj sultanate of Sennar. Egypt conquered the region in the 1820s; the Mahdist uprising ended that rule in 1885, and an Anglo-Egyptian condominium followed from 1899. Independence came in 1956, and the south became South Sudan in 2011.

Hospitality runs on strong coffee spiced with ginger and poured from a clay jebena. At Omdurman, Sufi devotees gather on Friday evenings to drum and whirl around the tomb of Hamad al-Nil. The economy has long rested on the land: gum arabic tapped from the acacias of Kordofan, the bulk of global supply, cotton from the Gezira irrigation scheme between the two Niles, sesame, sorghum and livestock, with gold mined across the north.