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his stateroom. Every time he goes on deck for a breather, he recognizes more and more of the Nile birds he pursued and stuffed as a boy, thirty-seven years before on his father’s rented dahabeah: cow herons, hoopoos, bee-eaters, black-and-white chats, plover, kingfishers, desert larks, and trumpet bullfinches. At night, he sits under the stars and listens to other, unseen species calling to one another in strange voices. He watches crocodiles and hippos slide through the black water and thinks up a phrase to describe the luminosity they shed from their backs: “whirls and wakes of feeble light.” His narrative has caught up with him: he is writing now almost in real time.

All that remains is to list the game he has shot on safari: 9 lions, 8 elephants, 6 buffalo, 13 rhino, 7 giraffes, 7 hippos, 2 ostriches, 3 pythons, 1 crocodile, 5 wildebeest, 20 zebras, 177 antelope of various species, from eland to dik-dik, 6 monkeys, and 32 other animals and birds: 296 “items” in all. Kermit has bagged 216—a total almost as impressive as the young man’s ability to match Heller and Mearns drink for drink.

“Kermit and I kept about a dozen trophies for ourselves,” Roosevelt writes in a final defensive paragraph. “We were in hunting-grounds practically as good as any that ever existed; but we did not kill a tenth, nor a hundredth, part of what we might have killed had we been willing.”

Shortly before noon on 14 March, Khartoum’s palms and minarets emerge from a red dust haze downriver. The Dal swings into the mouth of the Blue Nile and bears down on the private dock of the governor-general’s palace, where at last he sees, in his own half-regretful image, “the twentieth century superimposed upon the seventh.”

PART ONE

1910–1913

The epigraphs at the head of every

chapter are taken from the poems of

Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935),

whom Theodore Roosevelt rescued from

poverty and obscurity in 1905. He went on

to win three Pulitzer Prizes.

CHAPTER 1

Loss of Imperial Will

Equipped with unobscured intent

He smiles with lions at the gate,

Acknowledging the compliment

Like one familiar with his fate.

THE KISS THAT THEODORE ROOSEVELT longed for did not materialize when he stepped ashore in Khartoum on 14 March 1910. Instead, he had to return the salute of Sir Rudolf Anton Karl von Slatin Pasha, G.C.V.O., K.C.M.G., C.B., inspector-general of the Sudan, and pass an honor guard of askaris into the palace garden, where the elite of Anglo-Sudanese society awaited him amid the silver paraphernalia of afternoon tea. He was informed that Edith’s train from Cairo was delayed, and that she and Ethel would not arrive for another couple of hours. In the meantime, Slatin would not hear of the Colonel checking in to a hotel. A suite for his party had been readied in the palace, and a private yacht was standing by for sightseeing during his stay.

What Roosevelt wanted to see, more than anything but Edith’s face, was Omdurman. The battlefield, where General Kitchener’s Twenty-first Lancers had staged the last great cavalry charge of the nineteenth century, lay only ten miles away. Kitchener had been on his mind in recent days, if only because HMS Dal, the boat that had brought him north from Gondokoro, had been the triumphant commander’s flagship. On its boards, twelve years before, Kitchener had proclaimed British control over the entire Nile Valley, from Uganda to the Mediterranean.

The success of that dominion—or condominium, as the Foreign Office called it, as a sop to Sudanese, Egyptian, and Turkish sensibilities—was palpable in Khartoum’s tranquil, orange-blossom-scented air. Rebuilt by Kitchener from the ruins of a thirteen-year Muslim interregnum, the city was laid out like the Union Jack, its crossbars lined with stone villas and its triangles filled with seven thousand trees. Once the most violent flashpoint on the African continent, it now lazily breathed pax Britannica. In the sunburned, aristocratic faces of his hosts, in their perfect manners and air of unstudied authority, Roosevelt recognized the attributes