The River Nile [antikvár]

FOREWORD TJ ''u.'Ci m Our jet flew smoothly through the night, yet I was too excited to sleep. Moonlight etched the horizon for a hundred-mile view, vast as the ocean, of undulating Sahara dunes. Slithering like a snake, the great river came into focus. Then the moon caught it: For one jet-borne instant the water dazzled bright, flashing my own first glimpse of the River Nile. The jet was taking me from Rome to Khartoum in little more than six hours. Instead of shrinking distance, the plane meted out the truly enormous scope of time and space: from the golden city of the Caesars to the grit of Kitchener's last cavalry charge. The Nile unites all eras. Throughout the night, my thoughts roamed back to articles that had crossed my desk in years gone by. "The noonday sun was hot. " wrote Maynard Owen Williams in the National Geographic of May, 1923. "Thus should one approach that hell-hole in the hills where the greatest Pharaohs hid themselves " So read his eyewitness report as the wondrous tomb of Tutankhamun was officially opened. Pharaohs, pyramids, Roman legions —they ornament the pageant of the Nile. Napoleon's soldiers enter and stumble on the Rosetta Stone. Rommel's tanks advance, then flee before Montgomery. And now engineers toy with generators the size of sphinxes at the Aswan High Dam. Upstream, the river nourishes big game —and high adventure. "You chaps are committing triple suicide," one district commissioner told John M. Goddard and two companions when they undertook to navigate the Nile by kayak. The pessimist was nearly right. Before they were done, the men had burned with malarial fevers, dodged puff adders, and narrowly missed drowning uncounted times. Taking photographs ashore, Goddard met an elephant that "lashed the air with his trunk" and "charged me. I turned and ran, flinging my kayak into the river. . . before Jumbo thundered to the water's edge." Goddard lived to bring back his tales and pictures for National Geographic. Those photographs and thousands of others were part of the Society archives studied by staff writer Bruce Brander before he left on his two far-ranging Nile expeditions. Home again, he presented me with a bottle of clear water, a souvenir from a small spring in the Burundi hills: the southernmost source of the Nile. It recalled an ancient Egyptian proverb: "He who once drinks the water of the Nile . . . will return to drink again." The knowledge and lore of the Nile are like its waters. And in this spirit, your Society offers this book to read and read again — a volume as compelling as the River Nile itself. 'i'«, 'jWy'tit