My Favorite Author

If I had to pin it down, I'd say my favorite author, certainly of nonfiction, is Elspeth Huxley. I read The Mottled Lizard a few years ago--it was a crumbling paperback that probably had to be discarded when I returned it to the library--and fell in love with Huxley's easy style that vividly conveyed the realities of life in Kenya circa WWI. Now I'm in the middle of On the Edge of the Rift. Oh, you have to read it. She tells about a safari she took at age 12, accompanying her parents (whom she calls Robin and Tilly) to check out a farm site her father had acquired some 9,000 feet high on Mt. Kenya. They're camping out in this amazing mountain panorama. "So clear was the sky," she writes, "that the Milky Way looked like a plume of spray thrown across it by the bursting of some colossal breaker and held there in a myriad of frozen droplets." She goes on, ". . . we seemed to be afloat on some motionless vessel high above all the oceans of the world."