The lion rushed from the fringe of the donga like a rock from a catapult. He stopped like the same rock striking the walls of an embankment.

Beryl Markham, West with the Night

In the summer after my second year of college, a few months before I was due to embark on my first tour of Europe, I came upon Beryl Markham's book West with the Night. Born in England and raised in Africa in the first half of this century, Markham was an aviatrix, adventurer, horse breeder, and author. She hunted with the Murani, faced down angry elephants, and flew a tiny plane at night over the Serengeti.

In other words, about the only thing I have in common with her is breasts.

Markham lived as she liked; when she was 17 and her father left Africa for Peru, she stayed behind, alone, and bred horses. She traveled and wrote with open eyes and a wit as dry and warm as the African plains in a drought. When I read her book, I was an immature 19, about to embark on my first independent journey. This woman captivated me. There was no way I could not fantasize about being her.

However, I did not have Africa. Ahead of me I had Rome, Vienna, Prague, Paris... Though I would be traveling alone, the whole Eurail thing looked tame and pale next to Markham's voyages. At least it was a start, I thought. In the weeks that led to my departure, I could think only of freedom and adventure. Sometimes I dreamed of encounters with lions, not that I really expected to run into any in the Uffizi, or see a pride circling the Arc de Triomphe, but I relished the adventure of traveling alone in Europe for the first time. Bring it on, I thought. Lions, elephants or pickpockets.

I flew from New York to Paris and immediately boarded a speedy, southbound TGV. After many hours of alternating between sleep and long gazes out the window at the bright, dreamy countryside, I arrived in Florence.

The walk from the train station was long, and I found my pension at dusk. It was on the third floor of a decrepit palazzo. The entrance was dark and littered with piles of crumbled plaster. Damp construction tarps hung in archways, and everywhere shadowy niches recessed like caves. I don't know which bothered me more, the thought of who or what could be hiding in such dark corners, or the fact that I'd be sleeping in them. The dumpy, brusque owner of the pension insisted that I hand over my passport. Then she showed me to a small, dim, spare room.

I was alone. I had a moment to catch my breath from the flight, the train, and the walk. As if my emotions had trouble keeping up with my body, they rushed back suddenly, and the momentum almost knocked me over. I was very alone. And young. And female. It had all seemed like a good idea when, art history book in one hand and calendar in the other, I had mapped out my travels one city at a time. I sat on the narrow bed and realized for the first time just how far I was from home. I did not speak the language and I did not have my passport. I did not know a single person within several thousand miles. This was independence? This was freedom?

In one chapter of West with the Night, Markham describes a close call with an elephant. "The body of the elephant was swaying. It was like watching a boulder, in whose path you were trapped, teeter on the edge of a cliff before plunging. The bull's ears were spread wide now, his trunk was up...and he began the elephant scream of anger which is so terrifying as to hold you silent where you stand...It occurred to me that this was the very instant to shoot." Tough gal. But me? Could I be as calm faced with a ferocious Italian payphone?

I found my way to the post office, where I fumbled with coins, none of which seemed to fit into the phone. They were all too small, too big, too thick, too thin. The post office man found me crumpled at the bottom of the phone box, perilously close to tears, and exchanged some of my money for a phone token. It occurred to me that if I had one of those close-fitting leather aviator's caps - the ones with earflaps, like Markham is wearing on the cover of her book - I might be handling the situation a lot better. That cap, or maybe an elephant gun.

By the time my mother answered her phone, I was sobbing and incoherent. I hated Europe. I wanted to come home. No, nothing bad had actually happened. But what if it did? I was so far away. And I was all alone.

I clutched the phone receiver. A little bit of me hoped that she would tell me to catch the next flight home. And then my overprotective single mother said to her far-away, crying daughter what Markham might have said, had she lived another several decades and spoken with a New York accent. She said, "Get a grip."

"Buy a very big gelato," she said. "Walk slowly back to the pension, and go to bed. It will all be fine in the morning." Markham didn't have any gelato in the African bush, but since the natures of our adversaries were different, I accepted that our escapes might also be different.

I bought a cone with two scoops of gelato in it, one vanilla and one rose-flavored, perfumed and delicious. In front of the Duomo, a scruffy, grumbling American played Beatles songs on his guitar, a crowd around him. The next morning I opened the shuttered window of my room to let in the bright September sun and a view of a courtyard that was straight out of A Room with A View.

In the following days I saw Michelangelo's David and Boticelli's Venus. I climbed up into the domes of centuries-old churches and walked along the banks of the Arno. I had dinner alone in an outdoor cafe that overlooked one of the squares. The sun was well on its way to setting. I had two cannelloni, lightly blanketed with tangy tomato sauce. The two white-aproned waiters lingered a few tables behind me. And then for the first time, I felt a great pleasure fill me, the quiet calm and satisfaction that can come from being alone and yet fully in the world.

In her book, Markham describes flying her fragile plane at night. "Being in an aeroplane for even so short a time as a night and a day...with nothing to contemplate but the size of your small courage, nothing to wonder about but the beliefs, the faces, and the hopes rooted in your mind – such an experience can be as startling as the first awareness of a stranger walking by your side at night. You are the stranger."

What Markham knew, and what my mother meant when she told me to go get some gelato and walk slowly home, was that traveling alone can be a huge challenge. It can be lonely, and frightening because suddenly you must rely on skills and abilities you're not sure you have. But if you conquer your fear and open up your senses to a strange, new place, you can learn as much about yourself as about your destination.

That night in Florence, I watched the shadows lengthen over the streets, and for a second I stopped, seeing in a far doorway a faint tawniness that I thought just might be a lion...or a lioness.

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