The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead (hardcover)

Hamish Hamilton, 1972, hardcover, illustrated, index, 336 pages, condition: as new.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small handful of Westerners had ventured into the regions watered by the Nile River on its long journey from Lake Tana in Abyssinia to the Mediterranean-lands that had been forgotten since Roman times, or had never been known at all. In The Blue Nile, Alan Moorehead continues the classic, thrilling narration of adventure he began in The White Nile, depicting this exotic place through the lives of four explorers so daring they can be considered among the world's original adventurers -- each acting and reacting in separate expeditions against a bewildering background of slavery and massacre, political upheaval and all-out war.

Moorehead focuses on large-scale military campaigns rather than individual explorers. There is the narrative of Napoleon's disastrous invasion of Egypt and the more successful British expedition to Abyssinia in 1868 . Despite the larger scope it retains Moorehead's eye for natural and sociological detail, and his stories are fascinating.