Along the Uhuru Highway. The shacks, the corrugated roofs, the painted tin walls. The schools and the strange vestiges of Christianity–7th Day Adventist Church, Gospel Choir, All Souls, Jesus Saves All! The blooms of pink flowers, the yellow-blushed buildings. The greenery and red dust paths. Dirt-brown sheep graze alongside the tarmac. Half-built (or half-collapsed) towers protrude from rows of long rusted huts. People stand, at ease; or else they stroll along the highway, make a farce of the notion that we must always get somewhere quickly. That we must always get somewhere at all.

Then it opens up. There are still markets and schools and a strange trickle of walkers; but fewer, further between, like a leak, dripping out of Nairobi. Painted buildings, in exotic Crayola hues: Safaricom green, Naivasha purple (later, I will tell you about the purple lake). Bars, cafés, little conveniences everywhere. Brown and white cowhides hung on wooden fences, labeled “For Sale”, though no one seems interested in them. Now sheepskins, too, and what look like raccoon-tail hats.

Light is fading. We swerve around a roadblock. The rules here are unwritten, unspoken, and largely unknown-so everyone is just flying by the seat of their pants, all of the time. Even us, even them.

Fruit stalls. Live chickens for sale. Laundry hung on lines like so many coloured sweets–my eyes are overwhelmed. A sign: “Karibou Lari District”. Welcome. Vegetables, and more fruit. Bright rhubarb. Who are these people, these people who live in these pockets of colour and decay, whose lives are so incomprehensible to me? Where are they going? I find that the vocabulary of my imagination is too limited even to guess. Do you know what that is like? To find a blank space in your own mind? I get a piece of Tennyson stuck in my head–And in the dusk of thee, the clock/Beats out the little lives of men–only the lives of men are never little, I think. Suddenly the lives of men seem impossibly large. All of these men we have passed have lives far greater than I am able to guess at. This is a strange feeling; and I think I like it.

Then there is a ruined building to the right and the promise, but not really the manifestation of, a spectacular Rift Valley view. My first Rift Valley view. Everyone says, when you tell them where you’re going, that it will take your breath away. It’s part of the shared experience of being here. But for now, all is shrouded in blue-gold mist.

We suck on sweets. Werther’s Originals and powdered berry-flavoured lozenges. Spikes, roadblocks again. Forests of strange trees. Men standing at the spikes and the roadblocks, spitting, strolling, strutting, holding their guns like it’s the most comfortable thing in Earth, to be here in the waning light, miles from everywhere, with cold metal and the hum of passing matatus for company.

We drive on, deeper and deeper into a thickening fog. The Great Rift Valley. Through the haze I discern a certain, unspecific vastness. A green, cloudy vastness. There are women in pink, bent double against their burdens. The blue lines of tree-encrusted hills. And then Naivasha, sparkling in the remnants of the daylight, silver like the raining sky. Wide space.

❧

In the morning we walk to Lamu Town. The wind has stilled somewhat, and the sea seems momentarily calm. A soothing breeze still comes up off the water, for which we are grateful. Otherwise there is only our own sweat, pooled in armpits and crevices, and the taste of salt in our dusty mouths.

Past the Masai and their rainbow wares. They nod nonchalantly; they’re not interested in us, we don’t look likely to buy anything, or perhaps its just that the late-morning heat has steeped us all in its lethargic juices, and they cannot be bothered to hassle us, just as we cannot be bothered to approach their stalls. We slip into the town, buy water and matches from a funny little shop that smells of donkey piss. While the proprietress goes to find change for us (every transaction here is multiplied, like a ripple through the town–you buy something from one shop and invariably involve half the street), a small boy stands, his head just above the counter, holding a large clear plastic bag full of weed.

We go into the square and sit like the locals do, on benches next to donkeys. Our shoulders touch. He lights a cigarette; I flick flies from my (scandalously) bare arms. My wrist has begun to peel, a little. Beside us, a man is sewing up a hole in his flat white hat. He wears an identical one, sun-stained and intricately embroidered. The men shout across the square to each other; we’re caught in the crossfire. Sometimes it’s Swahili, sometimes Arabic, sometimes an incomprehensible mixture of both. A boy pushes a wooden cart labeled MEAT through the crowd. Wrinkled elderly gentleman lounge in deep plastic chairs outside their shops, as if by sheer age they’ve earned the right to sit on what amounts to the finest real estate in the square. They nod and smoke and though they barely move, their eyes are quick as hares, and whatever we see, I’m sure they’re seeing more.

We pop from shop to shop, making deals with smiley shopkeepers who shrug a lot and, with weary resignation (resenting, no doubt, the advice in all the guidebooks to bargain hard), lower their prices a token amount, to make us feel better about our feeble efforts. One man tells us about his brother, who had gone to rehab after a brutal drug addiction and now, two months too early, is coming home. That is why I seem distracted, he tells us, painstakingly counting out our change.

The walk back to the hotel is long and hot. We see boats in various states of decay and disarray. Wood rots, sinks into sand and sea. A cantering donkey passes us. I pick up a shell; I carry my sandals in my hand; he holds my fingers with his own sweaty set, and we push through the afternoon haze, through all the smells and the roar of the motorboats and the low-tide emptiness. And out at sea, as always, men are unfurling their sails.

❧

We take a dhow to have tea at a hotel on Manda Toto. It’s a two hour journey, alongside Lamu, past the town, then north. The mainland looks close enough to touch. We snake through mangroves, then emerge suddenly into open ocean, bobbing like an empty glass bottle in a grass-coloured sea.

We arrive at the island windswept and soaked. We sit watching a deserted beach, sipping the much-anticipated tea and eating fruitcake. The cake is vile, but the fresh saltwater air has inspired an unusual appetite in us. A group of sun-browned schoolkids sit behind us, sharing photos of each other kite surfing and flying little biplanes. They wear towels and swimsuits, their hair tinted gold, matted by sand and wind. Their parents own this hotel, and the land on it, and they look so at ease in the rugged, empty landscape. As if they are the natural inhabitants of this uninhabitable land. One of the owners tells us she can’t even keep her books on the shelves; the heat, the humidity, the wind, the moisture when the rains come–it’s always something, she says, something always ruins them prematurely. So they’re tucked away in her air-conditioned office. I have the sense of being somewhere very beautiful and very fragile. As if the illusion of civilization–the swimming pool, the teacups and their tiny saucers, the bottles of liquor behind the bar–are like a Buddhist sand painting, and the slightest breeze, or else the ebb and flow of the tide, will wash it all away in an instant.

We sail back towards the sunset. The wind is softer and the sea smoother, and we make good time, sipping beers while the hairs on our arms stand up in almost-cold for the first time since we’ve arrived here. We pass the mangroves again, where baboons sometimes dwell, as well as eel, who live in the coral; we glide through a channel once passable only at high tide, until they dredged it, just 10 or 20 years ago; we pass the place where they make limestone, turning it into powder bricks to transport to the island, and a farm where they grow coconuts and mangoes. We pass a stretch of sparse beach near Lamu Town which used to be uninhabited. Then a group of American troops came in and used it as a base; just two years ago they vacated the area, and the previously empty land is being settled by locals. We pass what used to be a cotton-cleaning plant, still labeled as such (Lamu Ginners Company), but which now acts as the holiday home for an Indian businessman based in Mombasa. We pass a warm, well-lit house owned by a wealthy German. It seems everywhere has a story here, if you look hard enough.

Our dhow captain tells us that he himself lives with his mother; he can’t afford a house of his own, because prices for property have increased so much in the last few decades. Once it was very cheap, he says. Not any longer. But he doesn’t seem angry about it. He points out another rich man’s mansion. He tells us that the walk from Shela to Lamu Town, just a few kilometres of sandy beachfront, has become very dangerous at night, that men often hide in the bushes, preying on would-be evening strollers. He becomes suddenly protective of the tourists; if we catch these robbers, he says, we’ll kill them. I’m not sure if he means it literally, but his voice sounds sincere enough, his tone detached, but then in the next breath he asks if we’ve ever been sailing at night before, says in some ways he prefers it to sailing in the day, and we gaze at the black space between Shela and Lamu Town and I suddenly think it must be a very lonely life, for that Mombasa businessman, or that wealthy German, and that I don’t think I’d like to own their expensive properties.

❧

The island has stolen my tongue. I have little to say, and the heat slows my thoughts. My observations are shallow, callous, surface-truths. I see things simply as they appear; and have lost the ability to doubt any appearance, to consider the prospect of deception, or depth.

It’s a visual, sensual world, you see. Like being steeped in the place; we are all tea bags, we are all drowning in sensation, we are all living in our own tea dreams. It comes over you, half-suffocates you with the relentlessness of its vivid colours and oppressive heat. The wind could drive you mad if it wasn’t so maddeningly refreshing, all the time. At least ten times a day I say ah, that wind is nice–I can feel myself becoming boring, becoming deadened, I can hear the repetition in my words and yet I say it again, that wind is so lovely. We know it’s lovely, but we say it anyway, because otherwise our voices might be completely lost, because it anchors us here. And meanwhile each taste and sound is magnified by the equatorial sun; every smell cooked, made more pungent in the heat. We’re part of some sort of witch’s brew, some Shakespearean tonic.

But all this is meaningless; empty observation, as I say. Where is the story? Where is the meaning–or at least, the application to something greater than the self? All that occurs to me is a pretty phrase or two–words strung together in new ways, so they evoke a new image. It’s all evocation. As if we’re in Plato’s cave, watching the shadows. Everything is illusory. A half-remembered dream, a conjuror’s clever trick. Prospero is hiding somewhere here. I see his eyes sometimes behind the palm-frond swords which part in a breeze.

I find that being on an island always does this to me. The literary romance, the circular nature of it, is irresistible. Things reflect and are reflected. It’s pure sorcery; I sometimes wonder if the island as we know it is not just a fictional creation–a state of mind rather than a geographical phenomenon. Geographically, you see, everything is an island. But here we are on an Island with a capital “I”. It’s the opposite of everything we know at home–whatever our home, whatever we know.

In the town the heat becomes trapped in alleyways; little eddies of still air, a shocking, stifling, sudden heat that sucks the breath from our lungs. We have coffee under the shade of a tree, go off in search of pretty things–bright cotton kikois, a carved wooden game, some painted cards. It is hard for me to see the beauty in objects here. Everything is faded, overpriced, and my material yearnings, usually so strong, are quelled by something as simple as a brief sea-breeze, a glimpse of a man bent in homage to his God, an accidental taste of the Indian Ocean. (There is such poetry in prayer here. The shoes left behind, the song of the muezzin, the way you can count on it like clockwork).

The bougainvillea is neon-pink and falls like paper leaves to the ground of our balcony. Always there is this sense of decadence and decay–the way the petals wilt at midday, give off their heady fragrances. The way each moment is stretched by the wind, melted by the sun. Time disappears here, only to reappear later, only to deceive you altogether; you find yourself wide awake in the smallest hours of the morning, viewing the world through the veil of a mosquito net; and then suddenly it is growing light and you are still tired, but you could not stay in bed, and the rest of the day is like you are swimming through Prospero’s dreams.

❧

In the morning, another strong wind shifts the clouds. Everywhere you go here, all the time, you can hear indistinct voices. Even in the toilet having a pee you can hear the children shouting from the classroom behind our hotel room. Often they speak English and once I get a lesson in my 6 times-tables.

“6 times 7 is what?”
“42!”

The water is integral here. Even when you cannot see it you can hear it, or smell it or, at least, at night in your room with the shutters drawn, taste it. You wake up with salt on your lips. Men make their livings, and their homes, from the water. They look more at ease slouched against the mast of the dhow, balancing on a narrow wooden beam, than they do on land. They’re adrift on the shore, unbalanced after hours, after centuries, of rocking back and forth on the Indian Ocean.

It’s a strange landscape, half paradise, half wasteland. As we walk along the beach to Lamu Town we pass a power station, a rubbish heap, a hospital, a mosque. All the practicalities. And in the background, this dreamy dark blue world of sea and sky and golden-sailed dhows. It is hot and windy. The winds this year have come late, just like the short rains did. They mask the heat of the sun; we are all burnt. My body has never been this close to the equator. Geography means something different, something physical, here.

There are schools and schoolchildren everywhere. One pair of tiny girls clad in pink cotton become enraptured by my gold sandals. They point repeatedly, saying, “Jambo!” and flashing quick little smiles, follow us for some distance until they lose us in the coil of backstreets.

On the walk back, on a barren stretch of beach, two Masai in purple robes pass us. They smile at our footwear, which we hold in our hands as we mince barefoot through the sand.

“No good,” they say. They point at their own rugged sandals, made of tire treads.
“You should do as the Masai do,” they say.

In the evening, the pink of pre-sunset, we have spicy, milky tea on a rooftop, seated amongst red pillows like sun-drenched kings and queens. We watch a couple on a nearby rooftop having sex until the sun goes down. We descend the stairs; the courtyard is empty except for a waiter in flowing white cotton who moves silently, a ghost in our consciousness.

The sea turns a gold-flecked blue, like it is Midas’ ocean. The dhows are all out on their sunset sails. We sit on an overturned boat on the beach in the new darkness, drinking beer. The stars emerge from behind their milky daylight veil, the masts stand proud near the violet shore, and on the horizon, the mangroves fade against the sky, the islands slip into the sea, the donkeys blend into the sand, and then, in the cave of night, we are suddenly aware of a thousand little sounds. The water slapping against dhows and speedboats, the wind in trees, in our ears, sliding across the sand. The pant and bellow of donkeys, the voices in greeting, the water going up and down on the shore. The muezzin’s call to prayer, and later, the children in the training centre laughingly practicing the same call in tiny voices. Our own voices, our own breath, the movements of our limbs. The story here is in the details.

Details like this:

In the hotel room. Our bodies are lobster-red in places, our skin hot to the touch. The fans hum. Nothing occurs to me, really. Everything is too visceral, too still. I think briefly of what John Fowles said about Greece, how too much time there was poison to the writer–”one has to be a very complete artist,” he’d written, “to create good work among the purest and most balanced landscapes on the planet…the Greece of the Islands is Circe still; no place for the artist-voyager to linger long, if he cares for his soul.”

But then I think that’s wrong, it must be, or partly wrong. At least I want him to be wrong; something else tells me he’s got a point, something tells me it would be too easy to be sung to sleep each night here, to lose the creative impetus, to feel the futility of any endeavor as it paled to nothing beside the vibrancy of a sunset or the careful architecture of a dhow.

But then I think: anyway, here we are, and that’s what we have, and there’s plenty of poetry in the thought of that. And when all else fails, we still have the place names, the other language, the words to stumble over, the lure of the distant, foreign ports.

❧