At Crater Lake, we sit around the remnants of a camp fire, staring out at the vile soda water lake, the line of dusky-pink flamingoes, whilst we drink Tusker and discuss the problem of corruption in Africa. Then we drive back and have dinner and sit under candle and star light.

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I’m glad I saw it now, because in a way, this country is dying. It’s what people say and it’s what you can see in their eyes. There’s something shifting, and even if you’ve never been here before you can feel it. There’s an emptiness. People aren’t staying in the lodges and hotels anymore; everywhere feels as if it’s bleeding, or been bled already. “The US Department of State warns U.S. citizens of the risks of travel to Kenya”. Unpredictability turns men wild-eyed, and now, with wild eyes, we witness the demise of a place.

Or not a place. Not exactly; for the soil remains, the infrastructure (or some of it), the cities and roads. It’s the demise of an era, a certain Kenyan state of mind. The reign of the white Kenyan is over, of course–it has been for some time but now it is surely on its very last, trembling legs. It’s strange to be here now, to hear the Europeans say with such certainty that their place is gone. Even the buffalo know it; they’re slowly encroaching, staking their claim, chasing the humans into smaller and smaller spaces, emboldened, made fiercer by their successes.

It’s a poignant place in time, for an outsider who had a dream of the place, rooted in antiquated ideals, and who has been lucky enough to catch just the tail end of how it was. Everybody talks about how different it was even five years ago; never mind the Happy Valley nostalgia, which is like a drug–this final stage of sickness has been so sudden, so powerful, that parts of Nairobi are unrecognizable to even old residents. Here on the edge of Lake Naivasha, there are the flower farms, which sprang out of nowhere; the thousands of employees, the projections of thousands more to come, the light from the city at night, which gives off a dusty glow of change.

Earlier I had this thought about the nostalgic places. Oxford is one; here is another. There must be others still. I would like to write about this. I think there is something in it. Every place has its own nostalgia but some seem to thrive on it, build themselves around it, up out of it, become what they are because of it. So here I am in another of the nostalgic places on Earth hearing people saying “This is Africa. It’s different. This is Africa.” And yet the nostalgia transcends even that; and even that cannot save it now, and even that cannot let us see what it will become, and though whatever it is now is something mired in corruption and memory and shock, and so whatever it will become will be rooted in that, you do get the sense that the buffalo maybe are right, and it’s about the land. It’s always been about the land, in a way; it’s always been about how, in a place that seems to go on forever, in a place where land looks like an infinite resource, space is actually limited. Property has been claimed and reclaimed a thousand times by a thousand people. As if something in the soil infects everyone who comes here; it’s never enough just to be here, but you must also own it, as it owns you. And now what will happen, now that the memory of it owns so many, while the reality of it breaks their hearts?

Seeing this place, you know: it’s dying. And simultaneously being reborn. In the end you can’t possibly know what form the rebirth will take. But here it is anyway. A phoenix, just before it bursts into flames, turns to ash.

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On our way back from Naivasha, we stop by Elementaita, once an impressive outlet for pottery and woven goods. Their looms and stock burned in a fire a few years ago and their recovery has been slow and unsure–maybe they will never regain their former glory, and maybe, to hear the whites talking, in half-despondent, half-satisfied tones, it won’t matter anyway. Things here are dying; things like this,becoming unnecessary and extinct. We buy some blue-painted doorknobs and a finely-shaped coffee mug. The men are kind, but I imagine a kind of sadness into their bright eyes; we’re the only people in the shop, maybe the only people to stop by all day, and if you think about it, even if the rugs are overpriced, our custom is paltry, useless, like shaking the hand of a beggar but leaving it empty. Outside a few drops of rain fall and thunder claps in the distance, and suddenly, briefly, on our way to the car, we are deluged.

We drive to Sanctuary Farm, to meet old Francis Erskine. The farm is not like anything I have ever seen before. It is sprawling, green, full of trees and pastures and horses and game. Driving down dusty tracks, we see wildebeest. zebra, impala, dikdik. There’s a racetrack, a rusty starting gate, stables, a polo field complete with an elegant, incongruous red pavilion.

Erskine himself lives in what appears to be a crumbling palace (one corner even has a concrete turret). We meet him on his terrace; the deckchairs are covered in a film of dust, the paint is peeling, the floorboards are cracked. He’s a small man with tufts of white hair and sideburns. He resembles a mad old king reigning over an abandoned and beautiful kingdom and in a way I suppose he is. He asks me if I ride, and seems pleased when I say I do. He offers us tea but we’re in a hurry to get back before dark, so he shouts inside to his staff to call the whole production off, and it’s just as well, he says, as he hasn’t any cake to offer us.

He shows us his study instead, which is infinitely better than any cake I could possibly imagine. It is decorated with historical photographs of his family. On one wall a huge painting of a pink-faced young man in uniform hangs; a great-uncle, killed in the Boer war as he went to place a white flag in the earth. “I’ve never liked the Boers,” Erskine says, turning away from the painting, showing us another, this one of a racehorse he rode to victory once, an elegant bay beast portrayed in all its spindly-legged thoroughbred glory, a fragile, highly-strung animal whose owners gave Erskine the painting as a gift in thanks for his success as a jokey. His desk is huge and covered with carefully arranged piles of things; it looks both chaotic and highly organized, and looking at him, I’ve no doubt he knows exactly what’s there, even if no one else does.

Then the mad old king bids us adieu from his dilapidated terrace. He is at once intensely vulnerable and fiercely, wildly independent; he’s so small, so fragile, so fearsome and storied. He says I should come back and see his horses, but we are going to Nairobi soon, and then back to England, and then this kingdom will seem more than just remote, it will seem as it is: impossible, anachronistic, poignant.

I imagine, as we drive away, that I can literally see the whole scene fading before my eyes, that, like a stage set, it’s being dismantled, dismantled by the years and the rain and the heat and that by the time old Erskine dies it will have sunk more or less right back into the earth from which it came, and then all that will be left will be a herd of zebra grazing on a polo field next to a red pavilion.

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Infatuation. That’s a good word for our dizzy relationship with places we feel particular affinity for. I’ve often thought this–that our relationship to, say, a city, has the same qualities as our relationship to a lover or a partner. I feel that with Oxford–this is what I keep trying and then re-trying to represent in The Book, The Book which has become like a beast in my mind. I keep trying to over-complicate it, as if I don’t trust myself, when really it is all very simple. Really it is only a manifestation of a love affair with a particular place.

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After lunch we take our time. I sunbathe by the edge of the lawn, watched by naughty monkeys and the occasional brave pair of rock hyraxes. My soundtrack is made up of incessant, gaseous grunts from the hippo and the shrill notes of the birds.

I sit for too long, too close to the sun, and then I have that heavy feeling, which comes over you just before sleep, or sometimes vertigo; my lids half-close against the glare, my limbs go sticky with sweat. My head feels hazy, full of sand; I’ve no doubt that, were I to suddenly stand, I would briefly but powerfully become dizzy, overcome by the black mist of heat-and-inertia-induced weakness.

So I move slowly to the shade, set up camp again on the smooth, cool terrace. I don’t know where everybody has gone–off hunting monkeys with slingshots, perhaps, or enjoying an impromptu snooze.

Laughter comes from inside. Grunts form the disgruntled hippos at the lake. I remember suddenly an ornament from my childhood, a blueish-green glass hippo, flat on one side, which stood, I’m sure, in the bathroom for quite some time. I feel it’s possible I even used to play with it in the bath.

Speaking of baths: I watch birds taking a bath. Action fails me. The monkeys crash onto the tin roof. They have enough energy for all of us.

I move back into the sun. I lie on a deck chair reading Blaine Harden’s piece on good intentions in the Turkana district of Kenya. He writes about the Norwegians, who decided to take the old fishing proverb literally, and not only teach the Turkana tribe how to fish (incidentally, these pastoral people consider fishing to be only a last resort, the desperate measure of a man who can’t keep his herd in tact), but also to build a multi-million dollar frozen fish plant in the middle of the desert. Within two days the plant had run out of fuel, and the attempt was deemed well-intentioned but misguided. And so it goes in Africa, Harden writes–money and wasted resources are poured in, but in the case of a flailing continent, it really isn’t the thought that counts. They need more than good intentions, they need good solid thought, research, and proper infrastructure.

Then I take a nap, being remote as I am from Turkana and its troubles.

Later we go into Naivasha to run some errands. We stroll half-anxiously up and down the main street. We attract glances by dint of our incongruity. One man wants to sell us something, but we decline the offer; otherwise people steer clear, as if we don’t really exist, maybe. A sweaty illusion; a pair of shadows. It’s a heavy, muggy afternoon, and the street moves quite slowly. Once a vehicle pulls into the post office and expels a brazen, pink-faced white woman, but otherwise we are on a brightly-coloured Mars. Our lives do not overlap with theirs in any way. The facades crumble and the shops seem asleep; in the bank, I see a woman in flared suit trousers and high-heeled sandals, and am almost relieved at the familiarity of her bank-teller composure, except that it feels even stranger out here. I see she looks out of place, too.

The security for the bank is thoroughly modern. An askari in a baseball helmet, holding his gun, sits outside and waves us in, one at a time. We push through one glass door and then wait while a metal detector scans us. A prim voice says, “Metal Detected. Please Step Forward,” and we push at the door and stumble into an air-conditioned, empty lair. Going out is just the same, but there doesn’t seem to really be any concern about safety and security, as if it’s all an elaborate theatrical production, and in a way, I’m sure it is–to make “us” feel safer, and “them” even further removed; but the reality is always simpler than that and in this case the truth is this: we’re all as fragile as each other.

We drive back, away from Naivasha, towards the edge of the lake. The street is teeming with walkers, cyclists, kids on their way home from school, in uniforms and winter hats. Along the side of the road runs a piece of the original Lunatic Express, now more or less abandoned, though all the infrastructure is there.

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