In December 1992, the late great P. J. O’Rourke and his fellow “trouble tourist” reporters visited famine-torn Somalia, which he described as the “worst place we’d ever covered.” But despite the mosquitoes, the dirt and the suffering, he had something of an epiphany:

We certainly weren’t worried about ecological ruin, shrinking white-collar job market, or fear of intimacy. All that “modern-era anomie” disappears with a dose of Somalia. Fear cures anxiety. The genuinely alien banishes alienation. It’s hard for existential despair to flourish where actual existence is being snuffed out at every turn. Real Schmerz trumps Weltschmerz. If you have enough to drink.

The great voyages of discovery towards the end of the second millennium were launched out of a particular sort of Weltschmerz, which of course is German for “world pain.” Their world was not what it was supposed to be because it was unexplored --- meaning that Europeans and North Americans had not been there and did not know what it was like. Unlike the 16th-century voyages of exploration, which were primarily about trade routes and finding new resources and native peoples to exploit, the latter-day explorers were seeking knowledge ostensibly for knowledge’s sake.

"Candice Millard is an outstanding narrative historian, with the gift of breathing new life into long-forgotten stories, but what she does best is communicate to the reader the horrid details of suffering."

However, the so-called blank spots on the map at that time were blank because they were difficult to access for whatever reason --- they were wet and lonesome (the Wilkes Expedition), remote and cold (the various Arctic and Antarctic expeditions), or actively hostile to human life (climbing Mount Everest, let’s say, or the TR expedition to the Amazon basin). The story of these expeditions, by and large, is the story of just how painful and difficult they were. (Lewis and Clark, just by way of comparison, had a relative walk in the park.) More often than not, real Schmerz didn’t just trump Weltschmerz --- it stole its lunch money and left it bleeding in the street.

RIVER OF THE GODS is about such a journey --- the travels and travails of the various English expeditions to pierce the interior of East Africa to discover the source of the Nile River. The primary focus of the book is Richard Francis Burton, who would have scoffed at the idea of modern-era anomie and would not have understood the concept of ecological ruin. (One wonders what Burton, who translated the Kama Sutra into English, would have made of the modern-era fear of intimacy.) Previous attempts to discern the source of the Nile by going south from Egypt had ended in ignominy; Burton agreed to lead two expeditions headed west from the island of Zanzibar. It was sound thinking, and ultimately resulted in triumph of a sort, but the expeditions were perilous in the extreme.

Candice Millard is an outstanding narrative historian, with the gift of breathing new life into long-forgotten stories, but what she does best is communicate to the reader the horrid details of suffering. There is a passage in which Burton’s companion and rival, John Hanning Speke, is attacked by an avalanche of beetles, one of which burrows into his ear and is poised to set off on an expedition for his brain. Speke was forced to try to dig the creature out with a knife, and Millard takes almost clinical care in exploring the depths of his misery.

It was the third expedition, led by Speke rather than Burton, that reached the northern shores of Lake Victoria and discovered a river flowing northward. Today, that remote spot is marked by a red granite obelisk, a near-twin to the memorial to Speke in Kensington Gardens in London. The African obelisk is in what is now Uganda. A few yards away, if Google Maps can be trusted, the weary traveler will find Elsa’s Juice & Wine House, and a bit north there are two mosques, a Catholic church and a Pentecostal one, a day care center and a couple of vocational schools. Across the bridge that marks Ripon Falls, several restaurants and hotels cater to the tourist trade. You can order a bottle of Nile Special Stout, fresh from the local brewery. Boat trips on Lake Victoria have earned five-star ratings on Tripadvisor.

Most of the world is emerging from two-and-a-half years of real Schmerz, or what we think of as such. For most of us, though, a lot of it is an inverted form of the explorer’s Weltschmerz --- there are no more blank spaces on the map, but we haven’t been able to go to any of them. What armchair journeys like RIVER OF THE GODS bring us is not a cure for Weltschmerz, but that other useful German word: schadenfreude. It may not be entirely seemly for the reader to take pleasure in the suffering of Burton and Speke, but the allure of traveling with Candice Millard should not be missed.