BOOKS

The Shadowy Source

BY PETER FLEMING EE appears, by his modest and disaffected narration, to have described things as he raw them; to have copied nature from life, and to have consulted his senses, not his imagina- tion.' The virtues which young Samuel Johnson discerned in Father Lobo, whose Voyage to Abyssinia he translated from the Portuguese, are present and indeed conspicuous in Mr. Moore- head. It is true that in this book,* as in its predecessor The White Nile, he is only incident- ally concerned with things as he saw them, his main task being to reconstruct the exploits and assess the observations of antecedent travellers. But to be objective about what others did a cen- tury ago is no less important, and no easier, than to be objective about what oneself did last year. Mr. Moorehead is bang on both targets.

To take the second first: from Lake Tana, 6,000 feet above sea level, the Blue Nile plunges over the Tisisat Falls into a deep, twisting gorge 400 miles long and in places a mile deep. Even in the dry season the current is too swift to be navigable and the bottom of the gorge is in general too precipitous to be passable on foot; thus the course of the river, until it debouches into the Sudanese desert, can be studied only with the aid of helicopters, and on this study an American survey-team is, or was, engaged.

'The writer was fortunate in being able to spend a day on one of these excursions,' Mr. Moorehead tells us. We note with approval the urbane influence which his nineteenth-century sources have exercised upon his style, and as he briefly but finely describes a fantastic experience ('it was not exactly claustrophobic in the gorge . . . but it created a certain dullness and uneasi- ness in the mind') we are grateful to him for sparing us the melodramatics with which, in one form or another, many of his contemporaries would have spiced their narrative—the narrow shaves, the pilot's blasphemy, 'The Valley of Death,' the photograph of the author poised on the edge of limbo, perhaps even the caption 'Brinkmanship.' Mr. Moorehead, modest and dis- affected, confines himself to the essentials--what the gorge looked like, what was in it, what it felt like to descend 'as in an elevator' to its vestigial and untrodden floor.

Towards the past he is not only objective, he is scrupulously fair. Perhaps the most important single fact about the past that the amateur historian needs to bear in mind is that it seemed no funnier to those who lived in it than the present does to us; before (to use the Victorian idiom) he permits himself a smile at the expense of his rude forebears he should consider *Tim BLUE NILE. By Alan Moorehead. (Hamish Hamilton, 30s.)

seriously whether he is not thereby distorting his readers' perspective and endangering the truth.

Mr. Moorehead, well aware of this, refrains from patronising. A less scrupulous writer, for instance, might have had a lot of quiet fun with the administrative arrangements for Napier's campaign in 1868, which proceeded, as Mr.

Moorehead justly observes, 'from first to last with the decorum and heavy inevitability of a Victorian state banquet.' The forty-four gun- elephants from India, the lighthouses for the Red Sea beach-head, the 250 dozen of port wine for each of the three hospital ships, the cholera belts and the man from the British Museum. But to portray as anachronisms now what were not anachronisms then is a form of cheating, and Mr. Moorehead, instead of demurely mocking what today seems cumbrous and outdated, is im- pressed by 'the intelligence of these arrange- ments. . . . The thoroughness and imagination with which this operation was planned . . . is simply staggering.'

The White Nile dealt mainly with individual travellers, one of whom—Samuel Baker—we briefly re-encounter in the companion volume. But most of this book is taken up with the accounts of three campaigns which were only indirectly concerned with the Blue Nile or with each other; it suffers in consequence from a cer- tain lack of continuity and we miss the feeling of organic growth which distinguishes The White Nile. Moreover, although the campaigns are ad- mirably described, each is a little too big for its canvas. The minor characters and the incidental details in whose management Mr. Moorehead excels tend to get crowded out or pushed into the background. 'What became of him?' we want to ask; 'and how did she come to be there?' It is as if the pages of a photograph album were being turned a shade too fast.

But this feeling is, after all, a tribute to the photographer's skill, and Mr. Moorehead is a splendid chronicler of wars. Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798 was technically a brilliant affair; 'in little more than a year, and with a force of barely 5,000 men, he conquered a territory half as large as France.' The foray met with strategic catastrophe (on paper) when Nelson destroyed the French fleet off Aboukir; but there is much to be said for placing soldiers in a position where they have nothing to do but fight, and Mr. Moorehead points out that 'the very magnitude of the disaster was of assistance to the French. It left them without an alternative: being now cut off from all hope of returning to France, they concentrated their energies upon Egypt.'

In the end, however, it was all smash and no grab. Extraneous crises brought Napoleon back lo Paris. Kleber was assassinated. Plague broke out. The French expedition, by now 12,000 strong, surrendered to 'a combined force of British and Turks' (of which, on a wider canvas, one would gladly have had a less fleeting glimpse). The Royal Navy, like a nanny carry- ing a fractious but exhausted child up to bed, Transported the French back to France; and the British troops sailed away from Egypt.

Six years later, in 1807, the Turks had changed sides. Muhammad Ali, at the head of 10,000 Albanians (how did they get there?), destroyed a British expeditionary force of 5,000 men; they were—the pages of the album are now being turned at a definitely unacceptable speed—'largely of non-British stock and badly led.' There followed a series of one-sided campaigns con- ducted with barely describable brutality which made the Turks masters of the Nile Valley from the Ethiopian mountains to the sea. 'It was the peace of death along the river.'

Napier's march over the mountains to Mag- dala, nearly half a century later, contains all the ingredients of melodrama. It was undertaken for the sole purpose of rescuing a number of European prisoners of both sexes, including a British consul. Their captor, the Emperor Theodore, was a figure very much larger than life, a sort of Grand Guignol Caliban. His fortress was a fantastic eyrie. The story has, as they say, everything.

And yet somehow it misfires as drama. The prisoners are a curiously dim lot in whose plight we take less interest than we should. Theodore's abrupt and arbitrary changes of mood prevent the suspense from building up; in the last act his behaviour is so inconsequent that he seems to be either drunk or crazy or both; and his final suicide takes place, as it were, off stage. We are left with a sense of anti-climax; even the little Abyssinian prince whom the British brought home and sent to school at Rugby dies at the age of nineteen.

Three abortive cavalry charges against modern firearms destroyed the isolation of the Nile Valley from Laka Tana to the sea. None of these engagements, whether of the Mamelukes against the French at the Battle of the pyramids, of the Shaiqiya tribesmen against the Turks at Korti, or of the Ethiopians against the British at Magdala, lasted more than an hour or two, or involved more than a few thousand men. Yet these were genuine crises : once their de- fences were breached none of these countries were ever to be the same again. . . . It seems absurd that such momentous consequences should come from these insignificant battles— hardly battles, merely a running of spearmen against modern guns.

Thus Mr. Moorehead begins an epilogue in which he briefly surveys the recent history of the Nile Valley. His words are true as far as they go, but do they not give an inflated histori- cal value to the cavalry charges? If these had not taken place—if the Mamelukes had come to terms with the French, if the tribesmen had run away from the Turks, if Theodore had hoisted a white flag over Magdala—the con- sequences would have been exactly the same: The little dusty battles were not themselves decisive, they were unavailing protests against a sentence which Fate had already passed. But it would be churlish to end on a note of criticism, and perhaps rather pedantic criticism at that. Mr. Moorehead has written an ex- tremelyT h The White enjoyable, Nile an and th eBl Blue Nile are now wh odiks: posed of, but one hopes that be will not forsake tthbeey say, has aas npaproeavcehnttful past. The Amazon,