Is the Hippopotamus Pool a legend? Or Amelia's nemesis! A masked stranger offers to reveal an Egyptian queens' lost tomb - and Amelia Peabody and her irascible archaeologist husband Emerson are intrigued, to say the least. When the guide mysteriously disappears before he can tell them his secret, the Peabody-Emersons sail to Thebes to follow his trail, helped - and hampered - by their teenage son Rameses, and beautiful ward Nefret. Before the sands of time shift very far, all of them will be risking their lives foiling murderers, kidnappers, grave robbers, and ancient curses. off once again on a rollicking adventure involving archaeology, murderers, kidnappers, grave robbers and ancient curses. And the hippopotamus Pool? It's a legend of war and wits that Amelia is translating, one that alerts her to a hippo of a different type - a nefarious, overweight art dealer who is on course to become her new arch-enemy!

They are famously fat—cumbersome, lethargic, and oddly charming for the way they lounge around half-submerged in muddy pools all day. Hippos are gregarious herbivores that don’t much like the heat, but as Edgar Williams shows in this colorful book, they can also be quite ill-tempered, and their huge mouths, sharp tusks, and powerful jaws can cut a small boat right in half. Taking readers into the swampy lands of Africa—as well as a few other surprising places—Hippopotamus tells the story of these iconic lumbering beasts. As Williams recounts, while Hippos are only found in Africa today, they actually originated in Asia. They are closer relatives to whales than to pigs or horses, as previously thought. And until the last Ice Age, you could find them as far north as Europe. Today the common hippo is confined to south, central, and east Africa, and its mysterious cousin, the Pygmy Hippo, is only found in the forests of Sierra Leone. From these natural confines, Williams explores how hippos have lived in much wider regions of the human imagination, from the hippo deity Taweret in Ancient Egypt to Obaysch, the first living hippo exhibited in the London Zoo in the nineteenth century, whom Charles Dickens called our “illustrious stranger.” A fascinating history of the hippo in natural and human history, this book also serves as a call for conservation efforts to protect this vulnerable animal.

A personable, affectionate discussion of the many aspects of the biology and ecology of both the common or river hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) and the much smaller pygmy hippo (Hexaprotodon liberiensis), written by a zoologist but perfectly understandable to general readers who may be curious about this disarming yet formidable creature. Interesting bandw photos and drawings. Distributed by Academic Press. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

A selfish hippopotamus, who will not share his pool with the other animals, learns a lesson about cooperation and sharing.