Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

""My heart stopped peacefully; its beating grew slow and weak, and then just - stopped. I died young. There is, really, only a little to tell."". "And so ended, in 1900, the short but remarkable life of explorer and writer Mary Henrietta Kingsley, most of which was spent caring for her ailing mother, and attending to the business of her world-wandering father. But the moment she was unencumbered, she set out on her own journey of discovery. Blithely ignoring the narrowly circumscribed roles and rules for a young woman of her day, she traveled alone to West Africa, and went to places no European had ever been.". "It is almost a hundred years later, on her fourteenth birthday, that Lily Austin first hears the name of Mary Kingsley, the only female face in a book full of male adventurers. That night, as an ice storm rages outside, something awful and unexpected befalls Lily; and this is why, as she matures into a young woman, it is to the writings of Kingsley that she returns again and ag