This tale starts with Richard Burton and John Hanningspeke setting out to find the sources of the Nile. The author tells of Baker of the Nile and his wife, and of the American journalist H. M. Stanley whose greeting to Livingstone became a household phrase. He also examines the results of their discoveries: the building of the Suez Canal, the appointment of Chinese Gordon as governor-general of the Sudan and his tragic end in Khartoum, of the military successes which made Queen Victoria the ruler of a huge area from Alexandia to the highlands of Uganda, and which opened the Nile as a highway from Central Africa to the sea.