Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress by Jan Morris

Author:Jan Morris [Morris, Jan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780156027748
Amazon: 0156027747
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 2002-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

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The compelling fascination of the Nile had exerted itself upon empires long before the British. Through the centuries historians, geographers and romantics had propounded theories about its source, which had acquired in turn a fabulous, an intellectual and a strategic meaning. The river was said to spring from ‘fountains’ deep in the African interior, from a range of snow-capped peaks, from a system of great lakes, or from Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon in Ethiopia. The source of the Blue Nile had been identified by James Bruce the Scot in 1770, but the greater stream, the White Nile, remained as total a mystery as ever. Nobody knew where it came from. It was a superb enigma, and as the British responded to their imperial destiny, as the public began to acquire its proprietorial interest in the other side of the horizon, as the London strategists evolved the theory that control of Egypt was essential to the security of British India, so the conundrum of the Nile became almost a national obsession. The British regarded it as a challenge specific to themselves, its solution as the greatest prize awaiting any British adventurer of the nineteenth century: and the tremendous journeys of the explorers in inner Africa, lasting years at a time, chronicled with mysterious rumour and consummated with best-sellers, provided for twenty years a running excitement for the people.

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