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This episode is brought to you by Jake Mueller Adventures,

a thrilling Christian audio drama.

This episode. The The In 525 BC, the Persian King Cambysus II, roused a group of 50,000 fighting men.

The army's sole purpose was to march across the desert as a show of force to the

Oracle of the Egyptian god Ammon, who had slided the Persian king and called doom down upon

Cambysus himself. The oracle's prophecy against Persia was no small matter, even to the Egyptians.

It required incredible courage to publicize such talk, since Cambysus was in the midmost of a campaign to conquer all of Egypt.

All that separated the two opponents was a 64-mile stretch of desert west of the Nile and east of the northern tip of the Red Sea.

The western desert is a brutal place.

But the ancients knew their way around its wilderness.

The oracle was not immune to risks of retaliation, and Cambysus' army was meant to remind him of just that.

So it was that the Sea of Men set out from the Suez Canal in the mid-afternoon.

For a few hours, the heat was stifling to the marching army, slipping up and over dunes,

squishing together to taste the shade beneath the black desert mounds.

The vast nothingness slowly faded into a night of primordial and mystic darkness.

Still, the men marched.

...