This first trip to Sinai enabled him to establish contacts with the Bedouin and prepare himself for the successful trip to Petra finally undertaken with Léon de Laborde in 1828. Meantime he visited the Fayum in 1821, then was sent by the Englishman William John Bankes to the Sudan commissioned to get geographical information and draw the monuments there. He was gone from Cairo thirteen months from June 1821, discovering the ruins at Messaourat and at Naga, only slightly in advance of Frédéric Cailliaud, the first European to reach Meroe. In 1824, Linant spent a couple of months in London, where the African Company proposed to support him in a voyage of exploration, as they had supported Burckhardt. After further travels in Nubia and Sudan, in 1827 he set out funded by the Association, to make his way as far up the White Nile as could be, in search of the fabled source of the Nile: tribal hostility forced him back at 13 degrees north latitude. In 1831 the Société de Géographie of Paris commissioned a further attempt, which was postponed by the viceroy, who sent him instead to find the gold mines in Atbai. In these travel Linant did not completely lose sight of his early experience in hydrology. In the Sinai in 1822 he had noted the traces of Trajan's canal, and had visited Suez and the peninsula's other lakes, and later he had roamed the Eastern Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea. "In 1827 and 1828" he wrote later, "I returned once more to the Isthmus, which I visited once again and its environs, and it was then that I began the first studies of a project of communication between the two seas." These projects he discussed with Laborde as they recrossed the peninsula on the way to Petra in 1828. There is a valley in the Sinai, once his contracts with the African Association were successfully terminated, Linant "passed more than a year alone with a choice library in order to study seriously and without distractions in order to acquire what I lacked in scientific understanding to take up service with the Egyptian government in the character of an engineer." At his return to Cairo in 1831 Linant was named chief engineer of the public works of Upper Egypt, a position that associated him in a long and fruitful career with most of the great works of modernizing Egypt's network of irrigation canals, the grand levées along the Nile.