It was to Richard and Maeve's holiday house at Lamu that we were going for Christmas. The engagingly filthy town of Lamu, one of the strongholds of Islam bordering the Indian ocean, lies on a sandy island close to the mangrove fringes of the coast. The imposing waterfront recalls Evelyn Waugh's Matodi in the first chapter of Black Mischief. Open stone drains, grey with suds, line streets too narrow for wheeled traffic, and heavily laden donkeys purposefully trot their unsupervised errands across the town. Skeletal cats sleep in patches of sun, black-veiled women, like crows, walk obsequiously past gentlemen lording it on their front doorsteps, talking the heat and the flies away.
Nothing disturbs the marabou storks at their one-legged vigil round the abattoir.
We left the high plateau of Nairobi for the heat of Lamu in a creaking, wartime Dakota that had first seen service when I was crawling out of the Mbagathi River. The unpaved landing strip is across the water from Lamu, and Richard and Maeve Leakey met us in a small motorboat. At the veranda we dropped our shoes and rinsed our feet in stone troughs before mounting the steps. There we met Samira's equally delightful sister, Louise, who is studying fossils at Bristol University, and the other guests of this hospitable family. It is a large, white, thankfully cool cathedral of a house, with an arched veranda, tiles and rush matting on the floor, no glass in the windows, no hot water in the pipes and no need for either.