The discovery of the Nile / Gianni Guadalupi.

Some pages fold-out to reveal other illustrations.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 349-350) and index.

The River of the Pharaohs -- The Imaginary Maps: Nile Cartography from Ptolemy to the Eighteenth Century -- A Dynasty of Slaves: The Mamelukes -- A Latter-Day Marco Polo: James Bruce in Abyssinia -- The Great Sultan: Bonaparte in Egypt -- A Slave Empire: Mehemet Ali and the Conquest of the Sudan -- The Lost City of Meroe: Frederic Cailliaud -- Black Ivory: The Slave Trade from Khartoum to Zanzibar -- Toward the Mountains of the Moon: Burton and Speke -- The Solving of the Enigma: Speke and Grant -- A Very Victorian Couple: The Bakers and the Discovery of Lake Albert -- The Missionary and the Journalist: Livingstone and Stanley -- A Brigand on the Throne of Solomon: The British Expedition to Abyssinia -- Excursions among the Cannibals: Schweinfurth and Miani -- Ismailia: Baker Conquers Equatoria -- The War against Slavery: Gordon and Gessi -- The Bankruptcy of the Khedive: British Occupation of Egypt -- God's Envoy in the Sudan: The Revolt of al-Mahdi --

A Million Pounds' Worth of Ivory: Stanley and the Relief of Emin Pasha -- Avenging Gordon: The Reconquest of the Sudan -- In the Shadow of the Pyramids: The Nile of Scholars and Artists -- The Nile.

For millennia, the Nile was the world's most intriguing geographic enigma. Where on earth might lie the source of such a powerful river? Roman legionnaires, Portuguese Jesuits, Scots, and Frenchmen all tried in vain to reveal the great river's secret; all were defeated by impassable swamps or diverted along dead-end branches.