At first we couldn’t see Mount Kilimanjaro, as it shyly hid its head under a fleecy bonnet of white cotton clouds that appeared to stretch all the way back to the Kenyan frontier. Then it appeared, towering and serene, emerging proudly into the cobalt blue skies, a symbol of constancy in this changing land of Africa. We stopped the truck and stared back in silence at the snow-covered spectacle, sharing the sense of disbelief that the German missionary, Johannes Rebmann had felt, upon seeing the mountain for the first time many years before. In the fall of 1848, he told the members of The Royal Geographical Society about his ‘discovery’, but was ridiculed for suggesting that a mountain covered in snow could exist close to the equator. It took another fifty years, before the German geographer Professor Hans Meyer and his colleague, Alpine mountaineer, Ludwig Purtscheller, climbed Kibo, one of the mountain’s twin peaks, for first time. In doing so, they also dispelled the Chagga belief that evil supernatural spirits lived on the summit. A year later, the poor mountain itself had to suffer the indignity of becoming a birthday present, given by Queen Victoria to her German grandson, the Kaiser Wilhelm. Of course the British monarch already owned snowy Mount Kenya, but it was rumoured that her beloved grandson was displeased that he didn’t possess a snow-capped mountain as well. I treasured the legends of the region, as they were part of our colonial past and formed a special bond between the mountain and wayward travellers. The minutes slowly passed, sound slowly spilled back into the canvas and the breeze carried the noise of a passing matatu through the remnants of any lingering silence.

We climbed back into the front of the truck, filled with a sense of wonder and eager to follow the dusty red track deeper through the lands of the Chagga. It was now early morning and the merciless sun rose even higher in the sky, slowly transforming the green savannah around us into a yellow bleached wasteland. Much of the surrounding plains lay in the grips of the worst drought that the land had seen for decades. Every hundred yards or so, we passed some native children and shouted ‘Jabmo’ or ‘Oonitwa nani’ down to them, in anticipation of a response. Some of them ran after the truck shouting at us to give them pens so that they could go to university. Some of them collected two or three in their hands but continued to ask for more, amply rewarding with their cries of "Asante sana" as our supplies of writing materials diminished to critical levels.

For a while, I lay back and watched some ambling giraffe and thought about the words of the Maasai elder whom I had met the evening before. I turned to Chris, our driver, and told him how the Maasai believed that the red God, Engai Na-nyokie, was responsible for the relentless sun.

"Maybe he’s responsible for our thirsts and the fact we have no more bottles of Kenyan Tusker lager left as well!" he laughed.

"No, that’s the fault of the black queen, because if she hadn’t shifted the border, we’d still be able to get more supplies!" I replied.

Chris came from outside Melbourne, raised on the sloping vineyards of the Yarra Valley, and had adapted well to life in Africa. He knew the local language and the customs of the tribes living on the savannah. As the journey progressed, I found that I valued both his friendship and opinion and knew that although he had only lived in Kenya for less than two years, he respected Africa and it’s traditions. Like many of his countrymen, he was a born storyteller, well versed in the works of Hemmingway and he knew all the tales about the mountain. He was acquainted with the history of the Maasai and told me how the tribe was divided and dispersed when their last great laibon (spiritual leader), M'Batian died. This leader had predicted the coming of the white man by using an analogy about a flock of large white birds arriving at the coastline. He predicted that a great winding snake would reach in from the coastline, which would eventually lead to the destruction of most of the Maasai tribe. Chris’s girlfriend, Karen, also came from Victoria, but hankered to get back to the tree lined avenues of the capital and take one of those green and yellow street trams to another destiny. They both respected the passion their partner had for travelling but both promised this trip would be their last, having seen many of their fellow travellers die from cerebral malaria or septicaemia.

By late afternoon we reached Moshi, a small coffee town of the Chagga that shelters on the rainy southern foothills of Mount Kilimanjaro. The town was the last stop on the Great Northern railroad, a colonial lifeline that once connected the African interior to the coastline. The Germans built the line near the turn of the twentieth century, but had destroyed it again when they were forced to retreat from Tanzania at the end of the First World War. Chris told me that the railroad was widely believed by many of the Maasai tribe, to be the great snake that would come from the coastline to fulfil M’Batain’s predictions. For a while we sat by the rail line, as he told me how it had been guarded in the Great War by a native Schutztruppe force under the command of a Prussian called General von Lettow. Totally outnumbered in troops, he pursued a guerrilla campaign, which successfully tied up 250,000 British forces until events in Europe overtook those in Africa. Chris said that before the war, Von Lettow had flirted with the young Karen Blixen and gave her an autographed picture of himself, which she used as insurance in case the Schutztruppe captured her, transporting ox-wagons to the frontier laden with weapons for the British East African Rifles. Chris told me that it was felt that Karen's gastric pain was the result of mercury poisoning, the only treatment available in Nairobi in 1915, when her syphilis was first diagnosed. I knew that some of her symptoms could be attributed to her chronic use of arsenic while she was in Africa.

I told him that many doctors felt that she may never have had the disease, but she stated this publicly because she felt it was a condition that afflicted heroes and poets, and it suited her intentions for creating her own personal legend. The wind rose again and I remembered the words that she had written when she was leaving her farm in Ngong Hills for the last time.

"If I know a song of Africa, of the giraffe and the African new moon lying on her back, of the plows in the fields and the sweaty faces of the coffee pickers, does Africa know a song of me?" " Will the air over the plain quiver with a colour that I have had on, or the full moon throw a shadow over the gravel of the drive that was like me, or will the eagles of the Ngong Hills look out for me?"

I looked again at the burning landscape, watching as a herd of elephant moved under the shade of some trees and realised that we were all just travellers passing through this land, this magical land of Africa.