His first step of liberation was a journey to East Africa in 1988, which led to his book "Leopard in the Afternoon." Then there was the pull of Sri Lanka, which he hadn't visited for nearly 40 years. "It is true that I was sent to England to school and I then decided to go to Canada to rebuild my family's lost fortunes," he says. "But I never got Sri Lanka out of my system. I always wanted to return, but the shame of what had happened to our family prevented me. Eventually I chucked everything and did all the things I should have done years ago, including returning to Sri Lanka to come to terms with the ghost of my father."

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This shame became one of the driving forces in his life -- and the self-avowed "selfishness" of his business career -- and it was only in writing "The Man-Eater of Punani" (1992), about the voyage back to the island of his youth and the search for his lost heritage, that he began to come to terms with his past. "Every writer has one book which is their best book. 'Man-Eater' is mine," says Ondaatje. "It really is an autobiography and a love letter to my father -- whom I never saw again. With it, I rediscovered my roots."

This interest in Sri Lanka also manifested itself in Ondaatje's growing art collection. What began as a humble passion has grown into the largest private collection of its kind in the world, stored at his mansion, Glenthorne, in north Devon. It contains maps, manuscripts, etchings, watercolors, paintings, armor, swords, daggers, knives and various objets d'art. The finest of all his Sri Lankan antiquities is a replica of Tara, a solid bronze-gilded image of the sakti -- or female essence -- of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokitesvara. (The statue has been held in the British Museum for the past 170 years.)

As if that were not enough, Ondaatje also forged a career as one of the world's leading experts on the Victorian explorers of the Nile, writing a book about Sir Richard Burton's early life, "Sindh Revisited," and retracing the footsteps of Burton and his contemporaries -- John Hanning Speke; society darling Samuel Baker and his wife, Florence; Dr. David Livingstone; and Henry Morton Stanley -- to see if Speke had indeed, as was claimed, found the true source of the Nile at Lake Victoria.

Since Herodotus in the fifth century B.C. and Ptolemy in the second century, men had been trying to find the Nile's true source. However, it was Speke who, in 1858, said, from the summit of a hill overlooking what is now Lake Victoria, near the present-day town of Mwanza, Tanzania, "I no longer feel any doubt that the lake at my feet gave birth to that interesting river, the source of which has been the subject of so much speculation and the object of so many explorers."

This declaration was to win him fame and adulation, and in turn launch the fabled "race for Africa" among the colonial powers. "History changed forever," Ondaatje says simply. However, Speke had concealed the true nature of his discovery from Burton, the expedition leader, and hurried to England to present his findings to the Royal Geographical Society -- despite the fact that the men had agreed to wait for each other before announcing any discoveries.

After a second expedition undertaken with James Augustus Grant, Speke mysteriously died in a shooting accident in 1864, the day before he was to debate the Nile discoveries with a by-now hostile Burton. "I've no doubt Burton would have ripped him to shreds," says Ondaatje -- particularly because on his second journey, Speke had ruminated in his notes that the Kagera River fed Lake Victoria (thus making it a tributary of the Nile), yet failed to present these findings, perhaps fearing it might lessen his glory.

In 1996, Ondaatje's passion for this question and these men's lives led him on a three-and-a-half-month expedition to the Great Rift Valley lakes of eastern and central Africa. The only way he could prove his own theories about the Nile's origins was, as Ondaatje puts it, "to go there."

So, with his team of local guides, he followed Burton and Speke's trail, "even into blind alleys, across rivers, through marshes, through fens, bogs, forests, getting lost, places right off the map, [even though] practically all the place names on Burton's map are not the same anymore.

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