River of History

THE BLUE NILE (308 pp.)--Alan Moorehead--Harper & Row ($5.95).

As Shakespeare well knew, the sun's heat bred serpents and other monsters out of the mud of the Nile. With The Blue Nile, this ancient river of mystery has now been made the object of two studies that employ all the modern arts of research to dispel myths and muddy misconceptions. Alan Moorehead, an extraordinary journalist-turned-historian who examined the history of one of the river's sources in The White Nile, tells in his latest book what succeeds the great civilizations--Egyptian and Greek--that rose and fell with the Blue Nile as its annual floods gave life to the narrow green ribbon across the deserts and supported the great cities at the delta.

Mamelukes & Missionaries. Moore-head's book is a historical morality play that sets up timely echoes in the modern imagination. At a time when the white man is leaving Africa, it details and dramatizes the manner of his arrival on that vast continent. As history goes, it is a short story and, indeed, a very disquieting one. What Moorehead calls the European reconnaissance of the Nile did not begin until the closing years of the 18th century. "For well over a thousand years the great civilization of ancient Egypt had been forgotten and its writings were a closed book, nor did there appear any bright prospects for the future. The Mamelukes [the ruling class of Egypt] had made the country almost as inaccessible to travelers as Tibet is today, the Sudan was virtually unknown, and Ethiopia, locked away in its remote mountains, was still the land of Prester John, a region of horrendous legends and medieval myths."

James Bruce, a gingerish Scottish aristocrat, was the first Briton to penetrate to the headwaters of the Blue Nile, at Lake Tana in Ethiopia. Bruce's intrusion into the "nightmarish fantasy of Ethiopian affairs," where he casually joined as it suited him one or another of the chronic little local wars, is a historic comedy with tragic forebodings. Bruce himself was an arrogant braggart, and Moorehead has great fun with his efforts to discredit the stories of missionaries who had been there before him.

Bruce was only a traveler; Napoleon was very much more. With Napoleon, Moorehead uses what might be merely historical pageant to dramatize the impact of European technology on African barbarity. It was as a young (29) revolutionary general that Bonaparte went to Egypt. Although the outcome is known, Moorehead's superb narrative of the French adventure has the quality of suspense. Napoleon brought a small force by modern standards of mass war (36,000, including sailors), but his riflemen alone doomed the ruling cavalry aristocracy of Cairo to utter defeat. Also, he carried the future in his own baggage train--150 enlisted penseurs, the intellectuals of the French Revolution. Propaganda, engineering, law and government, and an efficient system of tax collection were among the modern arts Napoleon brought to Egypt with his victory.

Nonetheless, Moorehead keeps a cold eye on claims that the Europeans brought only civilization to the mouth of the Nile. Despite the abominations of the slave trade, the prevalence of brothels, etc., the Mamelukes were men of law and religion; the "slave kings," the "gorgeous butchers," had maintained some kind of order for 500 years and had a taste and refinement "which would have been hard to parallel in western countries."

Many-Colored Thing. Through the 19th century, The Blue Nile follows slave traders, armies, missionaries and explorers up the river and beyond into the vast-nesses of Ethiopia. Moorehead, who was with the modern armies in North Africa in World War II, gives a sense of personal immediacy to remote events as he balances present against past. Through a fine talent for descriptive writing, he is able to conjure up the Nile itself as a physical presence, a many-colored thing as well as a great artery in the anatomical chart of historical man. The Coptic Christians on the cold Ethiopian plateaus, the animistic Negroes on the scrubby foothills and the Moslem Arabs on the plains below live environed in their own mud, marble, concrete or straw thatch, watched over by appropriate birds and weather.

In one chapter, Moorehead cites Lady Duff Gordon on the subject of Egypt: "This country is a palimpsest, in which the Bible is written over Herodotus, and the Koran over that." What will make the next permanent tracing on the old book of the Nile? The Napoleonic Code, British common law, an engineer's blueprint, or Das Kapital? This brilliant book provokes such questions. It also suggests what may be a happy token of the future: the last time Alan Moorehead saw the upper gorges of the Blue Nile was when he was aboard a U.S. helicopter, one of a team spraying DDT and doubtless other blessings along its ill-fated banks.

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