Books: African Sunburst

THE WHITE NILE (385 pp.)—Alan Moorehead—Harper ($5.95).

It is one of the niceties of geography that Lake Victoria is vastly larger and more important—being a principal source of the Nile—than Lake Albert. John Hanning Speke, poking about by himself while exploring with Sir Richard Francis Burton's expedition of 1857-59, discovered the inland sea before the existence of the smaller body of water was suspected. The order of discovery, and of naming, could easily have been reversed, but those were years when just about everything went well for Victoria. If the Khalifa of Sudan could...