FOR hundreds of years, the mighty Nile has drawn explorer and conqueror alike to the darkest heart of the African continent. On its green banks, flanked either side by dusty and arid desert, pharaonic civilisation was born. It was here too that the Victorian "rush for Africa" began, with adventurers such as Richard Burton (famous for stealing into Mecca and translating the Kama Sutra into English) and John Hanning Speke travelling to the fabled Mountains of the Moon searching for the source of the river.

This search also led Samuel Baker and his charming, freed-slave wife Florence to explore the tributaries that fed the Great Lakes and then on into the great river. And on the shores of those lakes was where American journalist Henry Morton Stanley met missionary and explorer David Livingstone in 1871.

This search for the source of the Nile, up the White Nile into the Lakes region and on into Uganda and Burundi, ushered in the greatest colonial period the world has known. It was, and still is, the dream of many explorers to conquer this mightiest of rivers. Yet the greatest flow of the Nile's waters originates with the Blue Nile, not the White, fed from springs and lakes in Ethiopia, far to the south and east of Egypt.

Until 2004, no one had travelled the Nile's entire length, the journey through Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt and out into the Mediterranean, using the Blue Nile as the source. Dozens had died, disappeared, been shot, eaten or given up over hundreds of years of trying. Then along came Pasquale Scaturro.

A hardened and obsessively driven American adventurer, climber, geophysicist and malaria sufferer, Scaturro, 52, and a small team of helpers braved terrifying, uncharted monstrous rapids, hippos, crocodile attacks, shootings, arrest, exhaustion, bureaucracy, mutiny and extreme temperatures to spend months battling this most extreme of rivers.

Mystery of the Nile: Adventure and Danger on the Everest of Rivers (Summersdale, 320pp, $24.95) is co-written by Scaturro's close friend and colleague Richard Bangs, a documentary producer, founder of internet travel portal Expedia and a director of a blockbuster IMAX film based on part of the journey. The smell and feel of the river, the gigantic vistas and endless traumas are vividly re-created here, based on notes Scaturro took during the journey (even after his laptop partly melted).

On the Nile, it was sand, not snow, that flew. For the next several days, the winds of the Sahara whisked the sand like flour ... The sky turned a hazy yellow, blurring the sun. The dunes smoked and the wind made a scratchy, drumming sound ... the worst haboob yet roared in. It was a tempest of dust and dirt and ground quartz, one that hissed and crackled, pummelled and polished like a living thing, a shifting, capricious, wilful enemy, obliterating all in its path.

Much of the book is dedicated to the demons that seem to drive Scaturro -- his mother was schizophrenic, for example -- and the pain caused by the many deaths and injuries he has witnessed. During preparations for one expedition, his son broke his neck in a freak accident; a friend died during his own attempt on the Blue Nile; and the pace of his adventures led in part to the break-up of his first marriage.

There are numerous battles with team members, too, from a lazy cook to his fellow adventurers. Clearly, he's a man who should have "adventure" -- one can think of other words, too -- tattooed on his forehead. In a way, then, this is a tale as much about Scaturro and his "far-sickness" (longing for travel), as he puts it, as it is about the river.

It is a life he has been pursuing for more than a quarter-century. In fact, as Bangs writes in the book, it was something awakened during his first scouts camping trip. Aged eight, he had to make the top of a mountain before his instructors.

As they made the ascent, the other kids dropped out early, leaving just Pasquale and the instructors. Then one by one the instructors started to turn back, some from fatigue, some from the altitude. Pasquale kept climbing, and toward the end he was crying because he was so tired.

Speaking on the phone during frantic preparations for a trip up the Eiger in the Swiss Alps, Scaturro says: "I've always been camping, getting lost, ever since I was a kid. I've always led trips, even in school and college. I probably started in earnest, oh ...", he pauses to think, "around 1980-81. I started in South America on the Rio Grande rivers; that's where I met Richard."

Scaturro says his passion led him to mountaineering but that he also had a young family and "needed to make a living and I couldn't just take off". From exploring his own backyard, he moved into canoeing up some of the world's most famous rivers. "I was boating on rapids but then I started noticing there were these great cultures and scenes around me ... I used to visit and never see the landscape. With the Nile, at sunset you can see for 100 miles into the distance."

Scaturro says he is "always looking after people" and from reading Mystery of the Nile, you can sense both a loving man, someone who clearly knows his stuff and how to handle strangers, and a man with a fierce need for control ("I always baulk when people try to control me"). He once took a blind explorer up Mt Everest, such was his determination to achieve the impossible.

Yet the Nile has been a changing experience, even in this hectic life. Bangs recounts Scaturro's dealings with dangers such as submerged crocodiles, attacks from tribesmen and grenade-wielding militia in Sudan. As a result, Scaturro admits, "One thing I learned is patience: OK, I've learned a lot about other religions and cultures, too, but patience is the main thing."

Except that the travel bug has grabbed him even more: "I go out, relax with my wife, but half the time I'm making lists for my next adventures. My poor wife," he keeps repeating.

When not leading expeditions or navigating rivers, he restores old cars and is learning to fly. It is a life framed by adventure and striving, propelled by how he finds "the US boring ... it's outrageously provincial".

He suddenly sighs. "The Nile taught me almost everything, you know. It was so long. I made mistakes ... but I miss it. The tranquillity. But I love my life. I've done this for years now, and until recently was never even paid for it."

With news that one of its failed 1968 explorers, John Blashford-Snell, has also returned to the Blue Nile, it seems the lure of this most ancient of rivers continues. Scaturro, meanwhile, is in Ethiopia and Sudan, his travel bug undiminished.

This story was commissioned for The Australian © 2006

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