It all began at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station, New York, in 1961 - Two Princeton graduates - John Hopkins and Joe McPhillips - have returned from Peru. Loathe to return to a life of work, marriage and mortgages, they are tempted by a mysterious letter from Kenya. Hatching a plan to ride a motorbike across North Africa, they buy a sleek, white R50 BMW and paint her name - 'The White Nile' - on the fuel tank, in honour of the route they plan to follow. In limpid, elegant prose, Hopkins describes deadly salt deserts and fig-laden oases, disappeared travellers and the funerals of young Tunisians killed in the battle for independence. He conjures up the ghosts of ancient Rome in Leptis Magna and of Homer's Lotus Eaters in Djerba . They encounter armed vigilantes in the Tunisian desert and outrun Libyan border patrols, barely escaping with their lives. They climb the pyramids of Giza at dawn and ride the 'Desert Express' across the wastelands of the Nubian Desert, but their final adventure, at Sam Small's Impala Ranch, is perhaps the most surreal of all -

While her father is in hiding after attempts on his life, 12-year-old Cleopatra records in her diary how she fears for her own safety and hopes to survive to become Queen of Egypt some day.

This personal diary of six months of diplomacy and travel in Arabia represents and impressive document to the quiet ability and resourcefulness of one of Great Britain's leading officials in the Middle East in the 1920's. The sudden expansion of the Arabian Sultanate of Najd under the leadership of 'Abd-al-'Aziz ibn Sa'ud after the First World War presented a clear danger to British interests in the Middle East and threatened the strategically important Arabian corridor to India. To resolve this project the British government selected Sir Gilbert Clayton as their envoy to negotiate a settlement of differences and to determine the frontier between Saudi Arabia and the British Mandates of Trans-Jordan and Iraq. Sir Gilbert Falkingham Clayton (1875-1929) was a quiet, able soldier, administrator, and diplomat who had come out to eh Middle East during the reconquest of the Sudan and remained as a political officer in theSudan service, secretary to the Governor-General of the Sudan, Sir Reginald Wingate, and finally the Sudan agent at Cairo. At the outbreak of the First World War, Clayton served as the director of Military Intelligence an forged that remarkable intelligence team which included among others Leonard Woolley, George Lloyd, and T.E. Lawrence. Experience and resourceful, Clayton was an obvious choice to travel to the tents of Iban Sa'ud where the autumn of 1925 he negotiated the Bahra and Hadda Agreements fixing the frontiers of Saudi Arabia with Trans-Jordan and Iraq and cementing friendship between Britain and Ibn Sa'ud. These results represent a brilliant triumph of personal diplomacy which protected British interests and inaugurated the lifelong friendship between Sir Gilbert and Ibn Sa'ud. The story of these negotiations and Sir Gilbert's subsequent mission to the Imam of Yemen as the first official representative of the British government to visit San'a' are told in this valuable historical diary. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1969.

In 1876, in a mountainous region to the west of Lake Victoria, Africa--what is today Ruwenzori Mountains National Park in Uganda--the famed explorer Henry Morton Stanley encountered Africans with what he was convinced were light complexions and European features. Stanley's discovery of this African "white tribe" haunted him and seemed to substantiate the so-called Hamitic Hypothesis: the theory that the descendants of Ham, the son of Noah, had populated Africa and other remote places, proving that the source and spread of human races around the world could be traced to and explained by a Biblical story. In The Lost White Tribe, Michael Robinson traces the rise and fall of the Hamitic Hypothesis. In addition to recounting Stanley's "discovery," Robinson shows how it influenced encounters with the Ainu in Japan; Vilhjalmur Stefansson's tribe of "blond Eskimos" in the Arctic; and the "white Indians" of Panama. As Robinson shows, race theory stemming originally from the Bible only not only guided exploration but archeology, including Charles Mauch's discovery of the Grand Zimbabwe site in 1872, and literature, such as H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, whose publication launched an entire literary subgenre ded icated to white tribes in remote places. The Hamitic Hypothesis would shape the theories of Carl Jung and guide psychological and anthropological notions of the primitive. The Hypothesis also formed the foundation for the European colonial system, which was premised on assumptions about racial hierarchy, at whose top were the white races, the purest and oldest of them all. It was a small step from the Hypothesis to theories of Aryan superiority, which served as the basis of the race laws in Nazi Germany and had horrific and catastrophic consequences. Though racial thinking changed profoundly after World War Two, a version of Hamitic validation of the "whiter" tribes laid the groundwork for conflict within Africa itself after decolonization, including the Rwandan genocide. Based on painstaking archival research, The Lost White Tribe is a fascinating, immersive, and wide-ranging work of synthesis, revealing the roots of racial thinking and the legacies that continue to exert their influence to this day.

Between 1856 and 1876, five explorers, all British, took on the seemingly impossible task of discovering the source of the White Nile. Showing exceptional courage and extraordinary resilience, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, Samuel Baker, David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley risked their lives and their reputations in the name of this quest. They journeyed through East and Central Africa into unmapped territory, discovered the great lakesTanganyika and Victoria, navigated the upper Nile and the Congo, and suffered the ravages of flesh-eating ulcers, malaria and deep spear wounds. Using new research, Tim Jeal tells the story of these great expeditions, while also examining the tragic consequences which the Nile search has had on Uganda and Sudan to this day. Explorers of the Nile is a gripping adventure story with an arresting analysis of Britain's imperial past and the Scramble for Africa.

Few people have garnered so much enduring interest as Sir Richard Burton. A true polymath, Burton is best known today for his translations of the Kama Sutra and Arabian Nights. Yet, Africa stood at the center of his adult life. The Burton-Speke expedition (1856–59) that put Lake Tanganyika on the map led to years of controversy over the source of the White Nile. From 1861 to 1864 Burton served as British consul in Fernando Po and traveled widely between Ghana and Angola. He wrote prodigiously and contributed some of the first detailed ethnographic accounts of Africa's peoples. In many ways, however, Africa proved to be Burton's undoing. Injuries and sickness sapped his strength, he made enemies in high places, and, ironically, even the discovery of Lake Tanganyika worked to his disadvantage. Increasingly frustrated and bitter, he turned to alcohol as a frequent remedy. In this fascinating story of the relationship between a man and a continent, geographer James L. Newman provides an intimate portrait of Burton through careful examination of his journals and biographers' rich analyses. Delving deepest into Burton's later life and travels, Newman pinpoints the thematic mainstays of his career as a diplomat and explorer, namely his strong advocacy of aggressive imperial policies and his belief that race explained crucial human differences. Historians and scholars of the golden age of empire, as well as armchair adventurers, will not only discover what defined this famously enigmatic figure, but venture, themselves, into the heart of mid-nineteenth-century Africa.