South From the Red Sea

This is a hard book to get a handle on, and probably even more hard to review.

For starters, I am left totally unsure about the cover picture - I can't find a relevance to the book - even with imagination... it remains a mystery to me.

The author, is a well known and well regarded volcanologist and geologist - and therefore this book revolves around these topics, but is definitely travel genre. He was born in Russia (Warsaw, so there is more confusion, as by my classification he is now a Polish author), but spend formative time in Belgium and France - Wikipedia calls him Russian, Belgian and French.

And so to the book itself. It is divided into two parts. The first, sub-titled In the Red Sea with “Calypso” tells of his expeditionary voyage to the Red Sea, and subsequent research with Jacques Cousteau in Cousteau's boat ‘Calypso'. They voyage from France to Egypt and the Suez Canal to gain access to the Red Sea. From there they visit Saudi Arabia, where they attempt to journey inland, but are politely declined, and spend a long time on a island called Abu-Lat, just off the coast of Saudi.

This section of the book was fantastically well written, the research and explanations of the research were fascinating, and it was just a joy to read. One of the interesting things was the casual mention of the very early use of the aqua-lung - a device Cousteau had developed.

It was therefore difficult for the second part to match up. The second half of the book was somewhat vaguely called Central Africa. It was hard to figure out exactly where the story took us, by but an large it was about the Rift Valley, and Lake Rudolf. The journey, as far as I can tell, took the author from The Congo DR (Belgian Congo at the time), around Lake Tanganyika, into Kenya and the Rift Valley itself up to Lake Rudolf (now known as Lake Turkana!).

Again, this was a well written expedition, interesting in its geology (lots about volcanology in this section) and a lot of speculation about huge geological issues. This book was published in 1956, so there was a lot still to be learned to catch us up to today.

The thing I struggled with most with the second half of the book was lack of landmarks or place names in the descriptions - they were occasionally mentioned, but few and far between, which made following the route too difficult. The map in the book is a half page of the whole of Africa - which for even the most nimble sighted would be hard work. There was no route marked, just a spattering of place names around the Congo/Kenya area.

So to put 4 stars against the second half of the book, still leaves me with 9/10, which really equates to five stars from me. Tazieff for me, has become a sought after author, as he has several other books, largely based on volcanoes.