On this day in 1997 Elspeth Huxley died. Huxley began a lifetime of journalism at the age of fourteen -- polo correspondent for an East African newspaper -- and wrote some thirty books in many genres, but her fame today comes from one best-seller, The Flame Trees of Thika. This autobiographical novel and its sequel, The Mottled Lizard, recount Huxley's youth in Kenya, on "a bit of El Dorado my father had been fortunate enough to buy in the bar of the Norfolk hotel from a man wearing an Old Etonian tie." The tale comes out of the same Africa as
