ELAINE K HOWLEY
In a quirk of human history, some of the earliest, most cogent artistic representations of humans swimming hail from an incredibly arid region where there’s not a drop of swimmable water. In a remote area of the eastern Sahara desert near the Egypt-Libya border, ancient paintings of swimmers adorn the walls of a dry, sandy cave at Wadi Sura.
These ageless images gracing the walls of the Cave of Swimmers suggest that once upon a time, the area sustained water-based recreation, which supports the idea that it wasn’t always the bone-dry place we know today. Instead, there may have been a time when that vast expanse of barren wasteland might have been a lush, tropical oasis with plenty of rain and lots of lovely lakes in which to dip.