[3] Grace's husband, Herbert Cranko, helped to raise money and secure permissions for Stella's subsequent expedition with Chaplin Court Treatt from the Cape to Cairo.
[1] In 1923, Stella married Major Chaplin Court Treatt, a Royal Flying Corps officer who had been tasked with surveying and constructing airfields for the southern portion of the Trans-African air route.
[note 3] The expedition was explicitly modeled after the fashion of Cecil Rhodes' "red line" connecting the Cape Town to Cairo, and they restricted their route to territories under British rule.
[2][note 4] Fred Law's account of the beginning of the trip, Woman Pioneer of Empire: Cape to Cairo venture Begun (Daily Express, 24 September 1924), began with an invocation of Rhodes' vision of a network of roads and railroads linking up British colonial possessions to afford white settlement and the more effective domination of the continent and its people:[16] "The second step towards the fulfilment of Cecil Rhodes' scheme to open up the routes through darkest Africa began this morning, when Major and Mrs. C. Court Treatt left Capetown in an attempt to reach Cairo by motorcar.
[8] The expedition left Nairobi on 10 October 1925 and reached Mongala eight days later, where they were received by Major Roy Brock, Deputy governor of Mongalla Province.
After declining an offer to transport their cars by steamer to bypass the Sudd, South Sudan's great central wetlands, they set off again on 25 October 1925 with the aim of reaching Terekeka, which lay about 60 miles north.
They rarely made more than eight miles per day, frequently needing to rely on people (often hundreds at a time) living along the route to drag and pull and raft or float their cars across rivers and haul them through swamps.
Stella met King George V and Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace, and her portrait was taken by the London photography firm Bassano Ltd, Royal Photographers.
[9] Their trip began at Port Sudan and continued the length of the railway to El Obeid, taking the Treatts through places like Abu Gabra that they had visited during their earlier Cape-to-Cairo expedition.
"[9] Much like the narrative of Cape to Cairo (1927), the story of Sudan Sand (1930) revolves around the difficulties that the Treatts encountered in trying to compel colonial subjects to dig a river without compensation or adequate tools or any obvious purpose in the heat of Equatorial Africa.