When Bernini designed his fountain of the four rivers for the Piazza Navona in Rome in 1651 he draped the head of the god of the Nile with a loose piece of cloth, to denote the fact that its source remained unknown. Tracing the sources of both the Blue and the White Nile would become one of the most heated and consuming of all Victorian quests and the adventures and tribulations of the men — Petherick, Stanley, Baker, Bruce, Burton, Speke — and one woman, Baker’s Hungarian slave wife, Florenz, have provided rich material for many generations of writers.
What Robert Twigger brings, in this great bag of a book, taking his title from the moment in early summer when the sediment from the Blue Nile, entering the White in full flood near Khartoum, turns its waters red, is a sense of the river itself, its size and diversity, its dams and barrages, its animals and insects, and the people who live along its shores.
A one time riot policeman in Japan, a poet, a sportswriter, a canoer and the leader of an expedition on foot across the Great Sand Sea in the Sahara, Twigger approaches his subject in true buccaneering style.
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