Set in Egypt and Nubia on a boat. Period piece

A bit long winded and full of moralising . I enjoyed it, but it is very Victorian and Empire-glorifying.
Some good action but not the best Conan Doyle.

A bit boring. After all, it was written a century ago when people were used to tedious descriptions of this and that. Also, the natives mainly served as redshirts for the European protagonists.

Conan Doyle’s The Tragedy of the Korosko brings together a group of mostly strangers, tourists from England, Ireland, France and the USA onboard a steamer on the Nile.

What could possibly go wrong while riding donkeys in the Libyan desert?

…….So they knelt together among the black rocks, and prayed as some of them had never prayed before. It was very well to discuss prayer and treat it lightly and philosophically upon the deck of the Korosko. It was easy to feel strong and self-confident in the comfortable deck-chair, with the slippered Arab handing round the coffee and liqueurs. But they had been swept out of that placid stream of existence, and dashed against the horrible, jagged facts of life. Battered and shaken, they must have something to cling to. A blind, inexorable destiny was too horrible a belief. A chastening power, acting intelligently and for a purpose—a living, working power, tearing them out of their grooves, breaking down their small sectarian ways, forcing them into the better path—that was what they had learned to realize during these days of horror. Great hands had closed suddenly upon them, and had moulded them into new shapes, and fitted them for new uses. Could such a power be deflected by any human supplication? It was that or nothing—the last court of appeal, left open to injured humanity. And so they all prayed, as a lover loves, or a poet writes, from the very inside of their souls, and they rose with that singular, illogical feeling of inward peace and satisfaction which prayer only can give…..

Thought this was such a brilliant book.
This could have been written today on the back of a tabloid headline.
So relevant to the horror of terrorism surrounding the modern age.
A must-read.

The copy that Ivread was a nice 1898 2nd edition of one of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Sherlock Holmes novels. I just finished this delightful adventure novel where a group of English and French men and women are on a pleasure cruise up the Nile in Egypt. When a small party of them agree to a short day trip excursion to see a few monuments, they are ambushed in the desert by Arabian Dervishes. Attacked, some are killed, others kidnapped, and the survivors are taken on a long camel caravan ride through a scorching hot desert only to await their fate.

There are a lot of great illustrations throughout the book by artist S. Paget. Fun story, I very much enjoyed it.

من الروايات القليلة التى اقرؤها ل ارثر كونان دويل
بعيدا عن عالم "شيرلوك هولمز"

الرواية عن مأساة اختطاف جماعة من الاوروبيين ...ما بين انجليزي و فرنسي و ايرلندي ..و امريكان ...
بواسطة جماعة من السودانيين
حتى استعادتهم بواسطة رجال الهجانة المصريين ....

ترجمة ممتازة للصديقة
نيرمين رشدي
لرواية مش مشهورة اوي ل ارثر كونان دويل

الرواية ...انسانيا فيها دراما و احداث و تفاعل بين الشخصيات
يعيبها من وجهة نظري ...النهاية المقتضبة ...و القصور و السذاجة من المؤلف فى المعرفة بالاسلام ...

الكتاب القادم :  عودة شيرلوك هولمز (Sherlock Holmes, #6)
ارثر كونان دويل برضه - بس حاجة امتع

Wow, so far I can recommend this to everyone. It is entirely timely for us today as well as a great adventure just for the heck of it.
Having finished, I have two complaints, because readers are just that way sometimes:
1- Doyle has this formula in every book of his I can remember reading. It involves the splitting up of a company of heroes in such a way that it appears that they will never see one another again. Well, it showed up in this book, and as soon as I read it, I knew the entire rest of the book even more than I had already known going in at the beginning. I mean, I knew it in a weary dreary way. I started scanning somewhere at that point.
2- Even the sunsets are an adventure, their exotic colors and beauty in the midst of sudden death and Arabs on snorting camels, I mean, the adventure level got to me at times.
Over all, I enjoyed the book. His descriptions did get to me sometimes, but at other times they really made me feel as if I were in the desert, or bouncing along on the top of a camel. No author can play this with consistent precision. Words fly away from us, but in the meantime, they make the sun glow softly through their wings, so it's all right.
I absolutely was amazed by the discussion in the beginning of the book between the Englishman and the American, discussing their places in the world of politics, war, and as global police forces. The Englishman warned the American about how it feels to have to face this, and says that soon it will be the responsibility of America to do the same, whether they want to or not.
I also loved the many references to prayer. The characters knelt and offered their entire hearts and souls. They did it several times. It was moving. At the end they have a spiritual discussion which wrapped up the emotions of the book very sweetly and concisely. I really, really liked that.

Not the one x

Although there is no end to the ways and manners in which a work can be read and analyzed, there are two main readings of this short novel which I want to focus on.

The first reading is one of otherness. The novel is obviously a pro-imperialist work, which preaches such doctrines as the white man burden and the superiority of the white race. This is, by no means, a matter of surprise considering that the author was a contemporary of the empire, and very probably a supporter too. Therefore, there is a great amount of prejudice, xenophobia, racism, and islamophobia which I am not even going to discuss or talk about (living in the 21st century and knowing that religion and race have absolutely nothing to do with evil deeds)

The second reading of the plot is that which interests me most as it provides a study of human nature under the most fundamental of drives, that is to say fear. The passengers of the Korosko are suddenly confronted with danger and even with the prospect of death. Some display valor, others recklessness. This is an interesting element in the story because the barrier between courage and recklessness is often blurred although the two are extreme opposites. Courage is one of the twelve virtues in Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. Recklessness is an excess of courage, and therefore a vice. Cowardice is a lack of it and accordingly another vice. The plot thus combines the three variations, and gives a noble aspect to the men who had managed to keep their courage in the face of death without being neither reckless nor cowards.

moments of beautiful writing; overall an exciting adventure. a nice quick read and takes you to the setting exceptionally well. but a bit too much racialism and condescending morality that i would not usually expect from Conan Doyle. not his best but not bad.

An adventure story from the person who brought us Sherlock Holmes. A group of European and American tourists is kidnapped in the Nile river in Africa, as they are visiting the wonders of the ancient pharaonic world. Not my favorite novels by this author, but still an exiting book.