The White Nile

“Alan Moorehead’s tale starts with Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke setting out to find the sources of the Nile in country rarely visited by outsiders. He tells of Baker of the Nile and his wife struggling with malaria, and of Stanley the American journalist whose greeting to Livingstone became a household phrase.

Alan Moorehead examines the results of their dixcoveries: 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.
He concludes with Kitchener’s military success at Omdurman which made Queen Victoria the ruler of the huge area from Alexandria to the highland of Uganda and which resulted in the Nile being, for the first time, an open highway fro Central Africa to the sea.”