PAGEANT OF THE BLUE NILE

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29952, 13 October 1962, Page 3

PAGEANT OF THE BLUE NILE

The Blue Nile. By Alan Moorehead. Hamilton 295 pp. Index.

Some 25 years ago, followin? the Italian attempt on Abyssinia, Lake Tana was often in the news. Italian engineers were supposed to be planning to block the outlet and drain the lake into the fertile plains on the west by means of a tunnel, 30 k. iometres long. But after six years the Italian empire collapsed; none of these ambitious plans had been realised. The very name. Lake Tana, was almost forgotten. As a result, the firstsentences of Mr Moorehead’s new book will have for some readers an oddly familiar ring, and will bring back those pre-war speculations that were so frequently heard, speculation about the future of tower Egypt, if the lake were blocked and the waters of the Blue Nile d. verted. Mr Moorehead wrjtes. “The Blue Nile pours very quietly and uneventfully out of Lake Tana in the northern highlands of Ethiopia. There is no waterfall or cataract, no definite current, nothing, in fact, to indicate that a part at least of this gently moving flow is embarked upon a momentous journey to the Mediterranean, 2750 miles away.” After describing the course of the river from its source to the sea. the author writes of its history over the last 200 years under four headings—“The Reconnaissance.’’

‘The French in Egypt.” “The Turks in the Sudan,” and "The British in Ethiopia.” It ■will be noted that, in fact, the book is something of a miscellany; Mr Moorehead has not been able to write so connected a narrative as was possible in bis previous book: “The White Nile.”

For instance, he begins his history with the travels of James Bruce, who was in Abyssinia at the same time as Cook was in the Pacific, observing the transit of the planet Venus. “ The Planet Venus.’ Bruce says, ‘appeared shining with undiminished light all day, in defiance of the brightest sun’—a statement that appears hardly credible, although Venus did, that year (1772), approach very close to the earth.”

There is occasional mention in these pages of earlier travellers, like Pedro Paez and Jerome Lobo; and it is surprising that Mr Moorehead should not discuss, in some detail, the travels of the latter. After all. Dr. Johnson thought so much of Father Lobo's book in his day that he translated it into EngMsh.

Bruce’s travels as related in these pages have the quality of a nightmare. In fact, “it is wonderful that he should have survived and have even been honoured among those violent men whose first instinct was to kill a stranger and then rob him of his goods.” He did reach the Blue Nile in its upper reaches close to the outflow from Lake Tana. However, in thinking he was at the main source of the mighty river, he was mistaken; for this was in Lake Victoria, a thousand miles away. Nor was he the first European to reach this spot.

Pedro Paez had already been there as early as 1618, and his description of the region agrees remarkably with Bruce’s. In his section “The French in Egypt,” which follows, the author begins at the Mediterranean outlet of the river. What he has to say here, concerning Napoleon’s invasion, is not, generally speaking, novel: but the details Mr Moorehead has gathered are not likely to be known to many readers in this country. A good example of the recondite information that has been collected is given from page 72 onwards, where the Mameluke warriors of Cairo are described. But with the account of the Battle of the Nile, Mr Moorehead is on more familiar ground. Part three of ‘‘The Blue Nile” takes the reader wellup river, and introduces him to a whole gallery of interesting people. There is a brilliantly coloured vignette of Sir Samuel and Lady Baker, “with whom one feels comfortable. Their’s was a Robinson Crusoe existence in the Wilderness, and to read about it is a delightful change from the slave raids and the massacres along the Nile.” These leisurely English travellers were quite pre. paired to pitch camp for three months at a stretch; and, in consequence. Baker’s notes on the landscape “have the impression of a quiet and observant mind.” He was able to produce a fairly accurate map of the river system of the Sudan, and to explain the action of the annual floods. His description of the people of the Sudan was enlightening, too, and geographers remained in his debt for many a long year. The detailed account of the British expedition against King Theodore of Ethiopia in 1868 winds up the book in an interesting if somewhat

inconsequent! I manner. Mr Moorehead explains that no colonial campaign was ever quite like this one. The nature of the terrain made the undertaking a fearsome one, and, as a result, preparations were made with Victorian thoroughness. There were 1300 fighting men, 19,000 followers and 55.000 mules and other transport animals. Heavy mountain guns were carried in sections to their destination. A fleet of some 300 vessels, was required to transport the expedition to Egypt. . The reason for all this is given in the first paragraph of Napier’s letter to King Theodore. “I am commanded by Her Majesty the Queen of England to demand that the prisoners Whom your Majesty has wrongly detained in captivity shall be immediately released and sent in safety to the British camp.”

King Theodore prepared to defend himself, putting has faith on an enormous mortar made for him by German workmen, “an astonishing weapon to be made in such crude surroundings—a solid lump of metal weighing at least 70 tons and shaped like an upended church bell. When filled with pieces of metal and fired by a charge, it was expected to produce the loudest and most devastating ex-

plosion that had ever been heard in Ethiopia.” (Incidentally it blew up at the first shot.) Except for this, Theodore’s preparations were those of an amateur, and finally he was penned up in the rocky fortress of Magdala, where he committed suicide. By a great stroke Of luck the prisoners in Theodore’s hands were found unharmed. and the expedition was considered to have been a brilliant success. Casualties were few, and Napier received a gracious welcome from the Queen, a step up in the service and a peerage. Mr Moorehead concludes: “It had been a great thing to take part in the Magdala campaign, and now that it was all over it could be forgotten.” It is at this point that the reader begins to realise that, in toe interest of the narrative, toe subject of the book: The Blue Nile, has also been forgotten. In tods case. however, the author’s discursive approach will be forgiven by most of those who open this volume.