Sunday, May 11, 2025, Plot 229, Nairobi South Cemetery, Kenya – formerly British East Africa.[i]
I left the Stanley Hotel at three o’clock this afternoon. The weather was clear, though it rained torrentially last night. Cars floated from the road.
The cemetery soil sticks to my shoes, rich and black. Fecund soil. My first full day in Kenya.
Hello Lomond. You are buried here, underneath the sedge.
Your father stayed at the Stanley in 1904, 1909, and 1914. More precisely, in 1914 James Ricalton was at the Stanley when he was not by your side at the British Hospital.
You lay feverish there for two weeks, Lomond, intestines perforated, seizing, delirious, then quiet. You died May 29, 1914. One hundred eleven years back. Since then no one from your family has visited. One hundred eleven years.
