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who has tried both, there is charm in the wild life .
    â€”W ILLIAM C OTTON O SWELL
    1972-1974
    R ANDOLPH LIKED R OSE TO TRAVEL WITH HIM . I N HER SAFARI khakis she looked like Katharine Hepburn, her long chestnut hair wound into a loose bun, pith helmet shading her pale pink skin, kerchief knotted loosely around her neck.
    In the early days of their marriage, Rose had accompanied Randolph on all of his assignments. He was a journalist, traveling sometimes with a photographer, but more often, as he preferred, on his own, to the far corners of the world. From these distant places, he crafted for Popular Explorer Magazine mesmerizing stories of the people and places he found, stories that allowed his readers—largely sedentary Midwestern folk—to imagine themselves there with him on his wild adventures. Randolph’s ability to make readers feel as though they were journeying right along with him accounted for the popularity of his pieces in the magazine, where they were accompanied by striking photographs, many of which he had taken himself.
    He was proud of the distances Rose had hiked in Borneo. “She’s the equal of any man I know,” he would say to anyone who might doubt her fitness for such an expedition.
    In Arabia, they rode dromedary camels across the desert, and Randolph watched her, slim torso swaying back and forth on the animal before him, her hand reaching up to shade her eyes as she peered off into the horizon line, sand meeting sky, sun hanging overhead.
    Threading their way through the narrow passes of the Alai Mountains along the Isfairan River valley along with their pack horses, Rose and Randolph spent their nights side by side in a yurt, eyes tracing the elaborate pattern of latticed framework over which a thick felt covering was stretched. It was avalanche season, and how thrilling it was to know that, as they slumbered, they might at any moment be buried under a new small mountain of snow. How thrilling then, also, to awaken in the morning, to step out of the yurt, and to see that it had not, after all, happened—not that night, at least.
    In Sri Lanka, during Esala Perahera, they watched the procession of elaborately decorated elephants to honor and venerate the sacred tooth of Buddha.
    In Tanzania they hiked Kilimanjaro. Rose made it only three-quarters of the way up before being stricken with altitude sickness, and Randolph spent a long night beside her as she shivered, wrapped in both of their sleeping bags.
    Rose had been ashamed that she’d taken ill; it meant neither of them would summit the mountain. But their guide assured her it might happen to anyone, insisting that, were they to try the climb again, it might be Randolph who was struck down and Rose utterly unaffected—yet another of the mysteries of the world.

    Randolph was a polymath, dabbling in everything, lucking into doing nearly all things well. As a child growing up in the English countryside, his heroes had been William Burchell, who, it was said, had set off on history’s first safari after being jilted by his fiancée, and Cornwallis Harris, whose safari paintings and drawings Randolph had pored over as a boy. He’d read Rider Haggard’s Allen Quatermain series again and again, conjuring wild worlds, darkest Africa, determined to live a life of adventure.
    His favorite tales were those in which the natural world triumphed over hubristic attempts to ignore or pave over them entirely, as in the story of the old Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, where patronage of the golf course dropped precipitously after a player was mauled by a lion on the fairway.
    Randolph’s parents had been decidedly unadventurous. Careful and protective of their only son, the most adventurous thing he’d been permitted to do as a child was to attend boarding school.
    His interest in adventure and exploration had begun when he had seen advertised in the back of his father’s Popular Mechanics a strange and