It ended, apparently, in Africa, just about a century ago, and no one who had anything to do with it thought for one moment that anything was ending. On the contrary, men supposed that a new threshold had been crossed, and that more doors would be opened as the years went on. But the last blank places on the map were at last being filled, and without any warning at all the old driving energy went to seed. The moment of final triumph was also the beginning of the end. The great age of discovery was nickering out; as it did so, Western man’s confidence, his inbred certainty that he and no one else was in charge of what was going to happen to the world, began to flicker out with it. It took a century for this fact to become apparent, but the process was at work.

This comes through in Alan Moorehead’s excellent The White Nile , which covers roughly the last fifty years of the nineteenth century, when the Nile was finally traced to its source, and the broad light of modern day fell upon the last recesses of the dark continent. Richard Francis Burton, Captain James Grant, and John Hanning Speke, abandoning the old effort to go up the Nile from Egypt, cut cross-lots from Zanzibar and got into the area of Africa’s great lakes. They were followed, presently, by Sir Samuel Baker, and then by Dr. David Livingstone and the slightly incredible Henry M. Stanley; after which, in the fullness of time, came General Charles George Gordon, who was killed at Khartoum. The great era of privately financed expeditions came to an end, and the European governments took over; General Kitchener led an army up the Nile and broke native power in the Sudan, accompanied—so recent was all of this, and so long is one man’s life span—by a brash young man named Winston Churchill. By the end of the century the Nile was known and was open (controlled, incidentally, all the way to Central Africa by Great Britain), and the great age of exploration had just about come to its close.

The White Nile , by Alan Moorehead. Harper & Brothers. 385 pp. $5.95.

Yet somehow it is what happened afterward that is most particularly interesting. The world today looks very different from the way it looked in 1900, and nowhere is the difference more striking than in Africa. Awaiting final exploration, Africa, as far as any man could tell, was simply one more sizable portion of the earth which Western society would first examine, then control, and at last exploit; and it went without saying that the exploitation would benefit not only Western society but the Africans themselves. Africa would be given the blessings of modern civilization, its age-old evils would be reformed—contemplating the atrocious slave trade, Dr. Livings tone called down Heaven’s blessing on any outsiders “who