Summary

In the Prologue, the author tells the story of how William Richard Hamilton recovered the famous Rosetta Stone from the French army after Britain’s victorious siege of Alexandria. The resulting translation of the stone’s contents imbued the scholarly elite of Great Britain with a heightened fascination about the secrets of Egypt and the African continent at large. Chief among the interests of the age was to “discover” the source of the Nile River, a job that would require “an army of savants in a single man” (6).

In “A Blaze of Light,” Richard Francis Burton became the first white man to enter the city of Mecca disguised as a Muslim. Though a native Briton, Burton never felt an affiliation with England or its customs, and was much more at home exploring the hinterlands of foreign regions. Burton was a master swordsman, and...