Word: nile
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Baffling Travelers. A chronicle in which explorer after explorer vanishes into the jungle necessarily lacks the grand narrative sweep of Alan Moorehead's The White Nile and The Blue Nile. But Sanche de Gramont, an able journalist and popular historian (The French: Portrait of a People), has written a book, covering roughly the years 1790 to the present, with its own ironic fascination. At the outset, as was true of the Nile, no European knew the source of the Niger (in the mountains about 200 miles east of Sierra Leone). Its destination was also unknown. There were even disputes...
Enraptured Paris. The space is never real. Cornell's L 'Egypte de Mile, Cléo de Mérode, 1940, is not the Egypt seen by Flaubert, detachedly noting the gleam of his white socks at midnight on the Nile. Cornell had never been, or wished to go, to that Egypt. But in his mind the image of Cléo de Mérode, a courtesan who so enraptured Paris society in the '90s that even Proust is said to have murmured "Gloria in excelsis Cléo!" when she walked into Maxim...
...committee. How well that succeeds only time will tell. The staging of the ambitious new production of Aida, introduced a fortnight ago, turned out to be dull and far too stylized, but musically it was exciting. The Triumphal Scene was a staggering series of orchestral and choral climaxes. The Nile Scene, that exotic musical fantasy conjured up by Verdi to heighten the opera's denouement, shimmered with color and mystery...
...looting and destruction of Egyptian temples continued down through the centuries. Early Christians, anxious to eliminate residual paganism along the Nile, smashed many monuments. Medieval Europeans created a brisk market for mummy, the bituminous substance used in mummification, which was thought to have a medicinal value...
Brutal Methods. It was Napoleon's Egyptian campaign of 1798-99 that helped launch the 19th century wave of Nile plunder. One of the expedition members most responsible was Vivant Denon, an artist and writer whose illustrated La Description de L'Egypte excited Europe's curiosity about the pharaohs' treasure. Unfortunately, though The Rape of the Nile reproduces dozens of Denon's paintings-and hundreds of other illustrations-only the dust jacket is in color...