With him, Ondaatje took all the various Victorian explorers' journals, so that "we experienced much that they had, whilst reading about their experiences."

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Baker had claimed during his journey (after Burton and Speke's) that Lake Albert and Lake Victoria were the sources of the Nile. "And why not?" says Ondaatje. "He was damned near the truth. These are the two mighty reservoirs of the Nile. But they are in turn fed by two rivers, the Kagera and the Semliki. And they drain the Burundi Highlands in the first case, and the Ruwenzori Mountains, the famed 'Mountains of the Moon,' in the second case." Ondaatje had found the Nile's true source.

The journey was not without danger, however. Attempting to climb the Mountains of the Moon, his team was stopped by the arrival of 5,000 rebels in the local town. (This was the start of the war by Gen. Laurent Kabila against President Mobutu Sese Seko's regime in what was then Zaire.) "I didn't know what was happening; it was a terrifying moment, and we were unbelievably lucky to get out."

Wading through swamps, marshes and bogs, Ondaatje now recalls, "I had been where no other Victorian explorer had been. Not Burton, not Speke, not Baker, not Livingstone, not Stanley. I knew I had crossed the line. I had in fact earned my own prize. And I am probably the only person ever to have done all their journeys."

Recalling the similar passions of his heroes, Ondaatje's drive and obsession are clear in his voice, the past very much alive in his work. He says that he is now living the life he always wanted to lead. "I've got adventure, travel; I've got writing, cricket; and I've got art." He speaks fondly, too, of his wife and their three grown children, now living across the world.

"He's a great friend, an incredibly energetic man," says Charles Saumarez Smith. J. Robert Knox, keeper of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the British Museum, calls Ondaatje "a complex character. He brims over with talents, facts, ideas and charm. He has an astonishing store of energy, leaving most ordinary people gasping in the wake of his lightning explanations of his theories and his collections. He is an entrepreneur and man of the world with single-minded determination."

For Ondaatje himself, there is just one more ambition: "I want to do one more book, call it the 'Last Safari,' trying to piece all the things I've done, from my early life to the last 12 years, to try and fit together this urge to achieve the unobtainable and what you have to do to get there, because preparation is everything. You have to cross the line to achieve it.

"The black leopard for me is the symbol, the talisman, the thing that I could never get," he says. "But now, late in my life, I've seen it and would like to write about it as a symbol of things that I would like to try and do -- the countries that have made me, spawned me, also the countries that have tended to destroy themselves."

salon.com | May 26, 2000

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