The small town of Wadi Halfa depicted here no longer exists: it was submerged by the flooding of the Nile Valley behind the Aswan High Dam and the creation of Lake Nasser. Its population was forcibly evicted and resettled elsewhere in Sudan while a new Wadi Halfa was built further south (and remains the port from which vessels travel north to Aswan in Egypt). [FN, 11/2020]
The Shablūqa gorge, north of Khartoum, pinches the Nile between low hills on both sides; it was a strong position used by the Ansar to ambush river traffic. [FN 11/2020]
As Lake Nasser was filling up, the huge Pharaonic temple at Abu Simbel – also doomed to be drowned – was rescued in an extraordinary international collaboration (steered by UNESCO’s Nubia Campaign), in which the entire temple was cut from the hillside and rebuilt in its current location 140 miles south of Aswan. [FN 11/2020]
