Rosemary Mahoney on assignment in Kenya for a magazine. The author of several books about her travels around the world, Mahoney has written her newest book, Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff, about her solitary 1999 journey down a 120-mile stretch of the Nile in a rowboat.

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Rosemary Mahoney is accustomed to the question. She hears it from friends, family, strangers. Sometimes, she asks it herself:

Why?

Why did she, a confirmed loner who cherishes personal freedom above food and drink — almost above breathing — choose to live for a year in Communist China, which was then, just before the massacre at Tiananmen Square, the most populous and arguably most repressive country on Earth?

Why did she, a non-believer, make a harrowing religious pilgrimage, walking 500 miles through the Pyrenees until her legs gave out?

And now, with the publication of her latest book this month, Down the Nile: Alone in a Fisherman’s Skiff, the question hangs in the air once again: Why would she, in a country where no woman could even conceive of such a thing, choose to row a boat for 120 miles down the Nile, risking arrest, heat stroke, and worse?

The short answer — but not the real one — is that a book, and critical acclaim, lay at the end of each adventure. The Early Arrival of Dreams, about her miserable but eye-opening year teaching English at China’s Hangzhou University, was her first, in 1990. “A vivid picture of the building frustration that led to the explosion in Tiananmen Square,” declared the New York Times.

That was followed in 1993 by Whoredom in Kimmage: The World of Irish Women, based on a kind of structured, journalistic pub crawl, talking to women, in which “Mahoney vividly portrays a still superstitious, class-ridden country belatedly stumbling into modernity,” according to Esquire’s review.

Then came A Likely Story: One Summer With Lillian Hellman (1998), looking back at the ghastly season she spent, when she was 17, serving as maid to the irascible and autocratic playwright on Martha’s Vineyard. “An endlessly fascinating book,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of the Times.

The Singular Pilgrim: Travels on Sacred Ground was next, in 2003. “The great twin pleasures here for readers,” the Los Angeles Times proclaimed, “are her sharp vision and prose that matches it.” Our own reviewer, Sam Coale, called it a “superbly wrought, eminently heartfelt, and meticulously detailed” exploration of seekers’ inner and outer landscapes.

Down the Nile, just released, is reviewed on today’s Books page. The new book garnered an early starred review from Publisher’s Weekly: “This is travel writing at its most enjoyable: the reader is taken on a great trip with an erudite travel companion soaking up scads of history, culture and literary knowledge, along with the scenery.” But when she rowed down the Nile, she had no plan to write about it at all, Mahoney said in a phone interview last week.

“This trip took place in 1999. I didn’t actually go thinking I was going to write a book about it. I did the trip just because I wanted to. I had just finished a book and had the time to do it. But I kept notes, which is what I do wherever I go, whatever I do. I write every day — who I saw, what happened. But I put them aside and it wasn’t until 2003, 2004 that I thought, hmmm, maybe I could make that into a book. It was always in the back of my mind.”

She was thinking about making the Nile trip nine years ago, when she was interviewed just after A Likely Story came out. She was living then near the Providence waterfront in a cavernous but attractive factory loft, since torn down to make way for the new 95/195 interchange. She then bought a house in Cranston, which she still has and will return to in October. She has traveled the world, yet still thinks of herself as a Rhode Islander, she says. She has family here, including a sister, Ellen Sawyer, in Barrington, and her mother, Nona, 82, confined to a nursing home with Alzheimer’s and extreme osteoporosis.

But just now, she is living, alone, on a tiny Greek island, in the villa of an old friend who no longer uses it. The friend tossed Mahoney the key and told her to stay as long as she wanted. That was a year and a half ago.

She is writing a novel, she says — her first. It goes without saying that she is also rowing around that island in the Aegean Sea, just as she rowed up and down Narragansett Bay when she lived here, and doubtless will again this fall. To say that rowing is important to her is to understate the matter by several orders of magnitude.

But as the subject of a book …?

“The thing about this Nile book,” she said the other day over a neighbor’s phone on her little island, “is that I just wanted to row down this beautiful river. And I found that when I was actually on the river alone . . . there wasn’t much to say! How many times can you say there were banana trees on the left bank and palm trees on the right bank? You know?”

If memory serves, she said that only once. The rest of the book, as she put it, “is really about the story of finding a boat, and interacting with Egyptians.”

It is much more than that. It is, as John Elson said in his Time Magazine review of Whoredom in Kimmage, “A quirky, observant chronicle . . . encased in prose so pellucid and evocative that readers may want to stop and reread passages just to savor the rhythms and imagery.”

Here’s one:

“Nubian bongo drums pulsed in the botanical gardens of Kitchener Island across the way. A curious warbler talked loudly in a tree. The young man had a thick face and a bouquet of coarse black whiskers on his chin. His hair was straight and glossy and black, and he wore it in a bowl-shaped cut, a curtain of bangs hanging to his eyes. His teeth, which I speculated had not been brushed since grade school, were the color of unpeeled almonds . . . . He sat in his boat and smirked at me. I asked him if he would sell his boat. “Three thousand bounds!” he shouted. His laugh was startling, a toy poodle’s high-pitched yip.”

But why row down the Nile in the first place? Why do all those other things, each adventure resembling some travel agent’s nightmare of a trip gone horribly wrong?

“I have asked myself what is it within me that wants to do these things,” she says earnestly. “It’s something about both wanting to live as fully as I possibly can, wanting to experience things, wanting to learn about the world, and it’s also — I think anybody who’s a risk-taker, anybody who does anything a little bit dangerous, is trying to get a little bit close to death so you can figure out what it is. I don’t know if that actually makes sense. . . .”

It may make a little more sense, at least to Freudians, when you learn that her father committed suicide when she was a child growing up in Milton, Mass. And that her mother, a devout Catholic, was crippled by polio in her 30s and became an alcoholic when her husband died. And that young Rosemary, of all the siblings, was the one who tried to keep her mother propped up, keep up appearances.

“I never saw my mother run, I never saw her dance, I never saw her ski. Those were all things that she used to be able to do; she was a great dancer. All of my life I only knew my mother walking on crutches and with a brace on her leg. And — I don’t think this consciously, but maybe there’s something subconscious about it — I wonder if I haven’t done some things because my mother couldn’t.

“Maybe rowing down the Nile was the craziest thing I’ve ever done,” she continues. “But I really think rowing on the Mississippi, or the Hudson River — 125 miles, a woman alone in her own boat — would be far more dangerous. I really do. You know, in the U.S. we have personal crimes, to an extent that you don’t really find in Egypt. Egyptians are very careful about foreigners. If a guy attacked a foreign woman, the consequences would be really severe for him. Foreigners are often treated better in Egypt than the local people are.

“I really never have had any problems with safety or legal issues doing any of these travels. I think I’ve been very lucky.”

Well, no serious troubles, maybe. But there was the time she was suspected of being a terrorist, trying to board an El Al plane from Bombay to Tel Aviv with a BB gun.

“It actually wasn’t the BB gun, it was a bunch of other things,” she said. “The main thing was, I was a Western woman traveling alone. They didn’t like that because sometimes what happens is a European woman will go to the Middle East, have an affair with an Arab guy, and when she’s getting ready to go home, the Arab guy puts a bomb in her bag, takes her to the airport, and says ‘Goodbye, honey.’ ”

“The second thing they didn’t like was that I had been traveling for about two months to a lot of places — this was when I was doing the pilgrimage book — and they didn’t like it that I had no ticket home, no return to New York, because I didn’t know when I’d be going home. And they really didn’t like it that I had a Syrian visa in my passport. You know, Syria is one of their worst enemies. They hated that. And they hated that I had a laptop computer, because that’s the perfect vehicle for a bomb. And also I had this little black BB gun, but that was not the biggest problem.

“Were you wondering why I had a BB gun?” Well, as a matter of fact. . . . Turns out she had been planning to camp out along the Ganges in India, and people had told her there were wild dogs there. A BB gun seemed perfect, to scare them away but not hurt them.

That story earned her a spot on 60 Minutes II with Bob Simon. She told him she thinks the Israelis were absolutely right to have detained her. “If we had been that vigilant, September 11th never would have happened,” she says now.

When she walked from Winchester to Canturbury in England, along what is considered the old pilgrimage route, there was no place to stay. So she slept in a tent every night. “And sometimes I slept in graveyards. Again, I know it sounds crazy, but my feeling about it is, a graveyard is one of the safest places you can camp out, because if you were a bad guy, and you saw a tent in the middle of a graveyard, would you be brave enough to approach it and find out what was inside it? I slept like a baby!”

She said rowing down the Nile may be her last big adventure. “I’m 46 now. I wouldn’t say I’ve settled down — I probably never will — but . . .”

She wants to finish the novel — hopes she can finish it, she says, insecure as always about her current project. Then she wants to keep writing. “And I think I’ll probably be back in Rhode Island.” And, of course, wherever she is, she will find a boat and row.

She never does explain that obsession. Maybe it can’t be explained. But in Down the Nile, writing about the moment she first set out on the river in a boat of her own, she comes close:

“I was alone, finally, with no one to protect me. I wanted to sing for happiness — a rare, raw, immediate sort of happiness that was directly related to my physical situation, to my surroundings, to independence, and to solitude. . . . I felt optimistic. And I relaxed enough that my mind could wander. That was always the best part of rowing — the repetition, the simplicity of the physical task, the slowly and constantly shifting surroundings that inspired free thought. My happiness was a feeling of physical lightness, of weightlessness, like drifting on air.”

driggs@projo.com