The Blue Nile is a relic from the past that draws a blank when inquired about in present-day bookstores. Few have heard of it. Fewer have read it. Even fewer are aware it exists. Yet the sweeping saga, brilliantly penned and first published in 1962, remains without a contender that dares to challenge, be it history or storytelling.
The book’s author is Alan Moorehead. A World War II correspondent who covered the death and destruction of the war as it steamrolled across the Middle East and Asia, almost from the beginning to the end, and who remains, even by the standards of today, a master storyteller.
Curating facts from a subject that makes schoolboys emit yawns to express their disdain and enrolling the help of men and women like the noted explorer Colonel R.E. Cheesman, who was instrumental in shedding light on the river in the 1930s, Moorhead fills in gaps with imaginative deductions and puts together this acclaimed masterpiece that changes the very nature of gaining information about long-gone days.
Moorehead does all this and more not by simply queuing up a long line of facts, but by presenting them as a masterfully narrated story that excites the imagination, and which makes this piece of literature a wonderful classic to own.
Alan Moorehead: Farbound.Net Digital Wallpapers.
The book takes readers on a vividly descriptive journey of events from the Sudan and into Egypt. Enroute, it recounts the exploits of early white geographers obsessed with discovering the source of the Nile. It narrates with utmost sincerity their vanity, hardships and follies. Cascades gently with Napoleon and his newly formed French revolutionary army marching to battle the homosexual Mamelukes entrenched in ancient Cairo before touching shore with the rule of Turkish overlords, petty and violent, and finally drawing to a rest with the arrival of the British in Ethiopia.
Like the river itself, the story flows in an easy and unobstructed manner, appending the classic with a hard-to-put-down label. Highly informative and documenting events, turmoils, the people and the times, the book is both a history classic and a traveller’s bible that enriches exploration of the ancient river and its banks, which over the centuries saw the rise and fall of civilisations.
