27 MARCH 1959, Page 24

The Tears of Isis. By Richard Carrington. (Chatto and Windus,

25s.) A new journey up the Nile, from delta to source, through an Egypt that the author sees sub specie ceternitaiis, haunted by the memories of 'more than two millennia of alien rule,' by way of shanty-town Khartoum, laid out in repeated Union-Jack pat- terns, to the suburbanised shores of Victoria Nyanza, with occasionally urbane, but often arch and careless writing about the places and people on the way. It is a sound professional traveller who can always lay his hand, like this, on a glass of sherry, but it is women's-magazine amateurism to write about 'creepy-crawlies,' and slipshod to complain of being 'saturated with temples.'