RIVER OF DESTINY

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 49, 27 February 1937, Page 27

RIVER OF DESTINY

BIOGRAPHY OF THE NILE

The author of "The Nile: The LifeStory of a River .from the Source to Egypt," Emil Ludwig, remarks that when writing the "lives" of men he has always had in his mind's eye the image of a river. Now a river itself is his hero, and in this book, the English version of which is published by Allen and Unwin, we have a pageant of the most famous of all rivers.

A reviewer of this book, writing in the "Times Literary Supplement," says that Herr Ludwig begins by stating ■in plain terms rt the distinctive and impressive characteristics of the Nile. He claims for it that it is "the greatest single stream on earth." There is dignity of purpose in its course which, but for one divagation, is a straight line. At the end of it it has created the most fertile, of all lands;" and that though it had to bring the life-giving water through a desert. .. Its banks are the home of birds and animals of innumerable 'species. Its vegetation ranges from the Alpine to the tropical. It sustains men of the most divers races —men of the mountain and men of the marsji, Christians, Arabs, cannibals, pygmies, and giants. The struggles of these men "for power and wealth, for faith and custom," are history of the Nile's making. Nowhere else in the world have men left as clear a record of their feats and attainments in the remote "past as have the men of the Nile.

The Nile as personified by him is singled out for a great destiny by the manner of its birth. Never a streamlet, it sprang from Lake Victoria down the Rippn Falls as a' river.. He invites us to think of it as a young creature rollicking in the escapade of rapids, puzzled when "ridden" by man in boats, and terrified when plunged over the Murchison Falls. This plunge is its first great adventure. Its'second is its encounter with the swamps in which, deprived of guiding banks, it almost'loses its identity. It extricates itself, to be halted by a strange pressure which reveals itself as the Blue Nile. Here ends the first of the three, sections of the book—headed "Freedom and Adventure." In the second, "The Wilder Brother," Herr Ludwig' writes of the Blue Nile—his conclusions being those given with more topographical detail in "Lake Tana and the Blue Nile." The trend.of the third section is indicated in the title "The Struggle with Man." In it comes the adventure of the cataracts, but the main theme is the subjection of the river by the. dam. Henceforward the Nile may be regarded as servant or saviour.

. In both capacities it is the ■ fertiliser. In writing of it. as such Herr Ludwig ■has much that is illuminating to say of the sources and distribution of. silt and .of the conserving of ' water drained by swamps and exposed to evaporation. A few episodes from the history of the past are' introduced to give perspective to the political-im-portance of the Nile in our time. This Herr Ludwig brings out lucidly and with impartiality—the personified; Nile making way for Baker,' Gordon, the Mahdi, Kitchener, and Marchand.. And so to the debated dam on Lake Tana. It is for the reader to carry on in the light" of recent developments a story which for Herr Ludwig ends in' the summer of 1935. , ~'_. .. ■ ~,