From the dust jacket:
Among the heroic annals of exploration the discovery of Central Africa and the sources of the Nile rivals the exploits of today's astronauts in terms of human endeavour, endurance and achievement.
In this great book, first published eleven years ago, and now reissued in an illustrated edition uniform with his Darwin and the Beagle, Alan Moorehead tells the story of the exploration of the Nile from the Mountains of the Moon to the Mediterranean. He vividly recreates the excitement of discovery and the realities of nineteenth-century politics as played out by a handful of remarkable and idiosyncratic individuals.
His tale starts with Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke setting out to find the sources of the Nile in country rarely visited by the white man, and tells of their encounters with people who may truly be termed noble savages. He examines the horrific trade in slaves, with its ramifications from Cairo to Zanzibar, and the British efforts to stop this traffic in human flesh. He tells of Baker of the Nile and his beautiful wife struggling with malaria, and of Stanley, the American journalist whose greeting to Livingstone became a household word.
After relating how the continent was 'opened up' by these extraordinary men, who travelled with delicacies from Fortnum and Mason, Bibles, Maxim guns and watercolour paintboxes, Mr Moorehead goes on to examine the results of their discoveries in terms of realpolitik: the building of the Suez Canal, the Khedive Ismail's appointment of Gordon as Governor-General of the Sudan, and the moving story of the last days of Khartoum following the rise of the Mahdi. He relates too, the strange episode of the German eccentric, Emin Pasha, hidden away in Equatoria until 'relieved' by the ubiquitous Stanley, and concludes with Kitchener's military victory at Omdurman and his diplomatic success after the Fashoda incident which made Queen Victoria the ruler of the huge area from Alexandria to the highlands of Uganda, and which resulted in the Nile being, for the first time in its history, an open highway from Central Africa to the sea.
In this edition Mr Moorehead has slightly shortened his text to make room for 48 colour plates and 120 monochrome illustrations, mainly from contemporary sources, a number of which have not been published before. They bring a new immediacy to a tale which has achieved classic stature.
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