If Sanguinarius actually traveled up the White Nile to the Ruwenzori range, it was an epic journey almost beyond belief.  He would have had to push up the Nile all the way from Thebes in Egypt  through the nearly impassible difficulties of the Sudan to reach Uganda.  It is a journey that he is unlikely to have made with a cohort of nearly 500 men with perhaps an equal number of women captured with the caravan of great riches.

Burroughs tells us that Sanguinarius and his fleeing party settled several times over the next five years in what they hoped would prove a permanent camp.  They discovered the hidden canyon where they founded Castra Sanguinarius quite by accident. (Burroughs, 149). 

After the deserting soldiers captured the caravan, they obviously killed everyone except the women, and had a large number of camels and horses to help with transportation.  ERB tells us that the fleet that landed at the port consisted of 120 vessels, so the caravan had to have been a large one to transport the hundreds of slaves along with the gold, pearls, diamonds, and a variety of aromatics and other merchandise.  The loss of this caravan had to have been a considerable economic blow to the Romans and Egyptians alike, so it was likely that they were followed. 

My guess is that the raid took place somewhere near Qus, and the party set out into the desert almost immediately near the temples at Luxor rather than remaining on the main road up the Nile.  They may have made a quick raid into Aswan before heading out into the Nubian Desert of the Sudan, and they most likely continued these raids along the seacoast until they reached the mountains of Ethiopia

Wolseley’s mistake was trying to move 11,000 troops up the Nile in hundreds of small whalers, suitable for rowing or sailing, when the obvious route suggested by most tacticians was inland from Suakin through Berber, thence to Khartoum.  Any commander worth his salt could tell that the way through the desert was the quickest passage, and Sanguinarius was a military man in a hurry. (Boyles, 71).

Nero sent an expedition into central Africa around 61 A.D.  They got as far as the Sudd, an impassable swamp.

“The African expedition, which may have started out from Rome in 61, consisted of a small party of Praetorian guardsmen including perhaps two officers.  After sailing to Egypt, they crossed the southern frontier of the empire near the First Cataract, this side of the present Egyptian-Sudanese border.  Then they proceeded south into the Sudan.  They passed the Nile’s junction with the Atbara and reached Meroe (Bakarawiga) capital of Napata -- an independent state, with which Rome maintained a connection.

Nero’s explorers had penetrated 1,000 miles beyond the imperial frontier, as the crow flies -- in reality, of course, their journey had been a very great deal longer.  When they finally got home again, they were interviewed by Seneca, who listened to their stories of parakeets, rhinoceroses, elephants, dog-faced baboons -- and, for good measure, dog-faced men as well.” (Grant, 98-99). 

Moving a party of nearly a thousand people through impassable swamps on one-man canoes does not seem like the likely course of a Roman commander with hundreds of camels and a great treasure on board.  Sudd is an Arabic word meaning “obstacle” or “blockage,” and indeed it was the major obstacle to discovering the source of the Nile by simply sailing up river. 

Brueckel and Harwood, who are the experts in locating ERB’s lost cities, place the lost “Greek”  cities of Athne and Cathne in Ethiopia “in the high mountains just east of the string of lakes between Adis Ababa and Lake Rudolph”  (Brueckel, 45).

In any case, I believe that Sanguinarius soon found himself wandering in the northern mountains of Ethiopia until he finally founded his city perhaps somewhere near the location of Athne and Cathne in the hidden valleys of that country. 

When von Harben came to the valley of the Roman cities he had to descend  into “a great abyss” -- a mighty canyon similar to that which has made the gorge of the Colorado world-famous” (Burroughs. Lost Empire, 20).  Ethiopia is part of the East African Rift Plateau. Millennia of erosion have produced steep valleys, in places 1,600 meters deep and several kilometers wide. 

As in the legend of Prester John, who may also have lived in Ethiopia, the final resting place of the lost Roman legion must remain a mystery.   However, if this little essay brings you a little closer to Tarzan and The Lost Empire  by Edgar Rice Burroughs, don’t thank me, thank little Nkima