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Marc Buhl
Rashida, oder, Der Lauf
zu den Quellen des Nils
Eichborn Verlag, February 2005, 208 pp. Sebastian Coe may have turned politician, and a Jew and a Scotsman may have won immortal fame through the epic duel depicted in Chariots of Fire, but the strangest story in the whole history of athletics must surely belong to Mensen Ernst, a Norwegian runner famous in his day who deserted the track for the sources of the Nile, reached them thirty years before Stanley and Livingstone, and on the way found true love. This is the stuff of fiction, and in this assured and sympathetic but decidedly freewheeling novel, that is what it has now received. Its subject’s start was unpromising. His father, a French sailor, was generally absent from home, which left his temperamentally restless young son feeling even more of an outsider than he might otherwise have done in the small Norwegian community in which he grew up. He escaped from this environment by gaining a place at the nautical college in Copenhagen, where his training ship was captured by an English frigate and he spent a hectic period being blown half across the globe. Next stop he is in the employment of the crazy Lord Queensberry, who, besides ruining Oscar Wilde, holds unpleasant theories about eugenics and thinks the young runner should contribute to the good work by helping to breed a new, faster race of humans. From him Ernst graduates to the service of an almost equally barmy German aristocrat called Wedemeyer, who organises races run by athletes for prize money and gets Ernst to run one from Paris to Moscow in two weeks. Now comes a brief immersion in German revolutionary politics and an encounter with the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria to whom the athlete declares: ‘He who stays still, dies’. How true in his own case! For rest and death come to him only in Egypt where, at Luxor, he meets Rashida, the love of his life, and at Lake Nasser, the source of the Nile, finds final quiet.
This talented writer has travelled widely to cover his
sources. Despite his exotic story his prose is controlled,
sometimes even poetic. Spellbindingly original.
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