The Nile, flowing south to north through Egypt to the Mediterranean, is more than 4,000 miles long, by some measures the world’s longest river, though by others a few miles shorter than the Amazon River. Travelers from antiquity onward could trace it upriver as far as Khartoum in Sudan. There it splits into two feeder rivers: the Blue Nile, flowing from Lake Tana in Ethiopia and known to the West since the 17th century, and the White Nile, which dissipates into a vast and impenetrable swamp, the Sudd, that at least through the 19th century no one could figure out how to navigate. The only feasible way to figure out where the Nile began was to start on the eastern coast of Africa well south of the Sudd and move inland looking for lakes and smaller rivers flowing north. But in the early 19th century, the geography of that part of Africa, indeed of most of the continent south of the Sahara, was a complete blank for Westerners.
RiverOfTheGods_062822.jpgA new book by Candice Millard, a former writer and editor for National Geographic and the author of bestselling accounts of Theodore Roosevelt’s Amazon adventures and Winston Churchill’s youthful exploits during the Boer War, is thus a welcome introduction for new readers to the captivating story about the great river. Millard’s book lacks the eloquence and richness of detail of Alan Moorehead’s 1960 classic The White Nile — down to the graphic horrors of the Arab-run slave market in Zanzibar. But she makes it up with a clean narrative style bolstered by impressive research.

Some of the characters who fill older works, such as the famously lost missionary David Livingstone (“Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”), are disconcertingly almost absent from Millard’s narrative. Her story centers primarily on Richard Francis Burton, translator of the Kama Sutra, the Arabian Nights, and other libidinous Eastern classics, and on his companion and ultimate bitter rival John Hanning Speke. Dramatically mustachioed and saturninely handsome, Burton was a sometime British army officer in India and a career iconoclast — he had been expelled from the University of Oxford in 1842 — whose chief talents were for womanizing and languages — he mastered 36, including dialects. His first expedition to find the source of the Nile followed on the heels of an 1853 pilgrimage, amply publicized by himself, to Mecca disguised as a Muslim. It would have been death to him as an infidel had he been found out, but Burton gloried in his ability to carry off Islamic manners and Islamic dress, which he wore long after the pilgrimage ended. The rivalry between Burton and Speke devastated both their minds and ultimately destroyed Speke’s.