African Sunburst

THE WHITE NILE (385 pp.)--Alan Moorehead--Harper ($5.95).

It is one of the niceties of geography that Lake Victoria is vastly larger and more important--being a principal source of the Nile--than Lake Albert. John Hanning Speke, poking about by himself while exploring with Sir Richard Francis Burton's expedition of 1857-59, discovered the inland sea before the existence of the smaller body of water was suspected. The order of discovery, and of naming, could easily have been reversed, but those were years when just about everything went well for Victoria. If the Khalifa of Sudan could dare invite the great Queen to yield before his might and embrace Mohammedanism, Victoria could afford to maintain royal .silence, confident that the varlet would be thrashed. And, by Kitchener, the varlet was.

The era of lake naming and varlet thrashing in the upper reaches of the Nile has been written about extensively, mostly in biographies or autobiographies of such heroes as Livingstone. Stanley and Gordon, as well as Burton, Speke and Kitchener. Author Moorehead's book is necessarily a synthesis, but it is a useful and readable retelling. The most serious objection to the work is that it is too short. Few books since the Iliad have had as many demigods to deal with, and the author can do little more than let them say their lines when they are onstage. But they still emerge as fascinating figures, and Moorehead's lively introductions should send readers back to the biographies.

Maiden Gift. Burton, for instance, was a skilled swordsman, an ardent Arabist who dyed his face and hands to lurk about bazaars, and a linguist who wrote and spoke 29 languages and once lived with 30 monkeys to try to comprehend their chatter. He wrote excellent books of exploration, and also widely admired erotica. But he could be wrongheaded; he insisted for years that Lake Tanganyika was the source of the White Nile,* even mentally changing the course of a river to fit his theory, largely because his subordinate John Speke (admittedly on slim evidence) claimed that the source was Lake Victoria.

Speke went in for clean living, but there was more to him than this. Once, purely in the spirit of science, he took a tape measure to one of the naked, grossly fat wives of King Rumanika of Karagwe (chest 52 in., thigh 31 in.). And he accepted the gift of dozens of winsome maidens from the neighboring King Mutesa. He died at 37, in a hunting accident, and his theory about the Nile's source was to be argued over for years.

The Mahdi's Head. It was Henry Morton ("Dr. Livingstone, I presume") Stanley, the tough-souled opportunist and a man who made a profitable business of exploration, who in 1875 proved Speke correct. Within 20 years a few extraordinary men had solved a problem that had puzzled geographers and bemused mystics from the time of Herodotus--the enigma of the source of the 4,000-mile-long watercourse that the ancient Egyptians venerated, quite correctly, as the provider of life itself. "It must be remembered," writes Moorehead, "that the explorers walked to the sources of the Nile; the country then was just as primitive and hostile as it was in prehistoric times, the harsh climate had not altered, disease was probably just as prevalent, and their scientific knowledge of the region was hardly superior to that of the early Greeks and Romans. This was a sunburst of Victorian courage."

What followed was the work of missionaries, soldiers and diplomats. The coming of the Europeans could only be delayed. In the Sudan, the Mohammedans revolted under the leadership of the Mahdi, and his insurrection gives the book its final burst of color. The reader sees the flamboyant General Gordon refuse to be rescued from besieged Khartoum. Defiantly he noted in his journal, later read worshipfully in England, that he .would not heed any order to leave unless the city's population was given a chance to leave also: I WILL NOT OBEY BUT WILL STAY HERE: AND FALL WITH THE TOWN, AND RUN ALL RISKS. Gordon ended with his severed head up a tree, but Lord Kitchener eventually smashed Khalifa Abdullah, the Mahdi's successor. The wild days obviously were over; when Kitchener pinched the Mahdi's skull from his grave with the intention of turning it into a drinking cup, Sir Evelyn Baring, a mere civil servant, made him give it back.

* At Khartoum, the Blue Nile, which springs from the mountains of Ethiopia, and the White Nile, whose source is the headstream Kagera and Lake Victoria, join to form the Nile River.

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