The trip's worst day coincides with my 37^th birthday. In the open-air market outside the walls of a 16^th-century Islamic town called Harar, I slip, fall, and scrape my left leg. Among the scrap metal heaps and Quran vendors, my knee starts to bleed, and I begin to cry. It's the mildest of scratches, but the sting and surprise is enough to make the dammed-up tears of a lonely trip fall. I scramble to find my cheap, knockoff sunglasses in my bag. I hate wearing sunglasses. In my embarrassment, I'm glad for them now.

Ten feet above me on the 600-foot cliff face, the barefoot, buck-toothed monk beckons and grins. He's another one who looks to be nearing 80, but the sun is so strong and feels so close to us that he is probably no older than 50. Anyway, he doesn't know his age. A blue-eyed, black-skinned Ichabod Crane shambling up sheer rock, his limbs are swaddled in white rags. He carries a pared branch as a staff, which he waves around casually as if he is not dangling above a 50-story free fall.

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke valued human relationships so deeply that he believed they could change the world.

For Holbrooke, listening was an elevated art. In public, he willingly waded into the planet's thorniest standoffs. And he solved them. He is best known for his success as chief architect of the Dayton Accords, where he successfully brokered the end of the war in Bosnia in 1995.

Whether he sets his tales in Africa, England, his native Trinidad or anywhere else, V. S. Naipaul is always writing about V. S. Naipaul. In this respect, "The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief," his 30th book and 16th volume of nonfiction, is not different. This latest journey to the continent is part of a larger whole, the developing narrative of a single consciousness.