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My Winter on the Nile
My Winter on the Nile
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The rock Aboosir, the ultima Thule of pleasure-travel on the Nile, is a sheer precipice of perhaps two to three hundred feet above the Nile; but this is high enough to make it one of the most extensive lookouts in Egypt. More desert can be seen here than from almost anywhere else. The Second Cataract is spread out beneath us. It is less a “fall” even than the First. The river is from a half mile to a mile in breadth and for a distance of some five miles is strewn with trap-rock, boulders and shattered fragments, through which the Nile swiftly forces itself in a hundred channels. There are no falls of any noticeable height. Here, on the flat rock, where we eat our luncheon, a cool breeze blows from the north. Here on this eagle's perch, commanding a horizon of desert and river for a hundred miles, fond visitors have carved their immortal names, following an instinct of ambition that is well-nigh universal, in the belief no doubt that the name will have for us who come after all the significance it has in the eyes of him who carved it. But I cannot recall a single name I read there; I am sorry that I cannot, for it seems a pitiful and cruel thing to leave them there in their remote obscurity.
A winter journey along the Nile, from Egypt into Nubia and the river country of northern Sudan. Charles Dudley Warner brings a traveller’s eye and a dry sense of humour to life aboard a Nile boat, village encounters, desert excursions and ancient monuments.
First published in 1876, My Winter on the Nile follows a much wider itinerary than Sudan alone. Its connection to our Sudan collection comes especially through Wadi Halfa, the Second Cataract and the cliff of Aboosir: places in the Nubian landscape of present-day northern Sudan, described before the great twentieth-century transformations of the river. This is the complete 37-chapter English book, not a Sudan-only selection.
Inside this edition
- A reflowable EPUB with adjustable text, a linked contents menu and all 37 chapters, with the original prefatory material retained.
- A new introduction explaining the northern Sudan connection and the book’s broader Egyptian and Nubian scope.
- A distinctive new cover, with original frontispiece, title page and decorative book artwork retained inside.
- English text for EPUB-compatible reading apps and e-readers. Digital download only; no printed book or audiobook is included.
About the historical source: the digitized book’s pictured title page identifies the eighteenth edition, dated 1895; the work itself first appeared in 1876. Most of its artwork consists of decorative headpieces and tailpieces, not photographs of Sudan. Warner writes from a nineteenth-century Western traveller’s perspective, including dated assumptions and prejudiced descriptions. These are preserved as historical evidence, not endorsed as present-day accounts of the people or places described.
The original public-domain transcription is available free from Project Gutenberg. This $0.99 edition adds our new cover, contextual introduction and checked EPUB presentation.
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