Three days had passed since the Emperor jumped down from the Assault Transport, a heavy linen canvas travel bag in one hand and a shield in the other. The basalt desert where they stood would one day be called the Black Desert of the Levant. At present, the black basalt scattered around ancient extinct volcanic craters had not yet been completely ground into gravel by wind and sand, and dense acacia trees grew everywhere.
A group of rye-growing humans lived here. Twentieth-century archaeologists would hold up the rye bread these people baked and the residue from their brewed beer, calling them the Natufians. This fertile land possessed more than a hundred kinds of grains, fruits, and other edible plants. Before launching the expedition, the supply station the Emperor had established here sent its nuts and fruit wine to Eridu every six months. Now, the supply station had been repurposed for military use, supplying cargo ships sailing from the Eastern Mediterranean and along the Red Sea coast, transporting food from here to the armies on the Egyptian front.
It was worth mentioning that, to deal with their rodent problem, the fishing-and-hunting Natufians often brought food to wild African cats. This was also humanity's first domestication of the animal. Likewise, to keep rats from gnawing through their cargo, many merchant ships from the Eridu civilization would take several cats aboard when passing through Natufian territory. When there were no rats aboard, the sailors would catch fish for the cats to eat. Some cats, upon reaching their destination, would leap from the ships without the slightest attachment and arrive in Egypt, North Africa, where their ancestors had been born. As a result, within just a few decades, many Egyptian villages had begun trying to domesticate wildcats. Even the temples of Eridu kept a