I

N 1964, aged 21, I set out from Cairo travelling up the Nile on a journey to central Africa. What inspired my adventure were two books by Alan Moorehead, a renowned war correspondent and author, about the exploration of the Nile in the 18th and 19th centuries.

The Blue Nile, published in 1962, opens with Moorehead’s description of his own visit to the source of the Blue Nile in the Ethiopian highlands, which a Scottish traveller, James Bruce, had reached in 1770 before making his way to its confluence with the White Nile, 1 450km downstream. The Blue Nile covers the next 100 years and includes such dominant figures as Napoleon Bonaparte, who was driven by visions of imperial glory in Egypt; Muhammad Ali, an Albanian mercenary in the Turkish army who founded a dynasty of Egyptian monarchs; and Emperor Tewodros of Ethiopia who provoked a hostage crisis when Queen Victoria failed to respond to his letter of friendship.

The White Nile, published in 1960, spans the second half of the 19th century, a period when European adventurers