Dell paperback, first Dell printing March 1962, 415 pages including endnotes and index, copyright 1960

I found this battered paperback with its small and unreadable maps in a second hand shop. The brittle yellow pages caused olfactory hallucinations as the adventure unfolded - like a scent carried by a faint breeze from an arid desert or a humid jungle.

Herodotus wrote "...of the sources of the Nile no one can give any account...it enters Egypt from parts beyond."

I never did figure out where the source of the White Nile is exactly from reading this book. Maybe I've had too many helpings at the all-you-can-eat bovine roulette buffet. There was so much debate, almost fisticuffs, among the explorers that Alan Moorehead plumb forgot to tie up all the loose ends and give his readers a final conclusion, or I missed that part while zoning out on three or four key paragraphs. I do that sometimes.

We meet Dr. Livingstone who observed, "The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves." The good doctor's description of a massacre by slavers that occurred at Nyangwe on July 15, 1871 led the Sultan of Zanzibar to close the slave market on the island forever. Stanley shows up in the nick of time to rescue Livingston at Ujiji on the east side of Lake Tanganyika on November 10, 1871.

Burton feuds with Speke about the source of the Nile.

Gordon makes his final stand at Khartoum in the Sudan and dies beneath a wave of the Mahdi's Moslem army on January 26, 1885.

Moorehead's description of the slaver Zobeir seems prophetic; "They raided like Mongols for hundreds of miles into the interior and spread that special sort of terror which is fanatically Moslem, and absolutely ruthless." I thought of bin Laden, although cowardly murder cloaked as guerrilla warfare is not the same as the actions of an uncivilized slaver or armies facing off in the field. But then who knows what evil religious fanatics will spawn or what rationalizations? Perhaps they equate the obliteration of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001 with the destruction of the Jewish Temple as foretold by Jesus - two thunderclaps to the ears of a deaf status quo two millenia apart. With two thousand years of hindsight and proselytising, the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem is considered justified. Will people a hundred generations hence view the end of the Twin Towers in the same light, as an assault on injustice? Are Palestinians modern slaves dying of broken-heartedness? (1/19/05 ...and then, of course, there's Darfur, so we never learn, do we?...)

(There will always be sociopaths who think their height of passion for an ideal justifies murder or that terrorism is a legitimate response to the collateral damage of affairs of state. And there will always be religious "leaders" that will not denounce a scoundrel simply because he is THEIR scoundrel.) All this from a paperback!

The story of Stanley's voyage in the Lady Alice down the Lualaba and the Congo rivers as part of a 999-day continental crossing from Zanzibar to the Atlantic ocean is "one of the great epics of African adventure."

Burton dies with a large map of Africa hung above his bed on which was written an Arab saying, "All things pass." [=]