Mount Kenya is the second-highest mountain in Africa, standing on its own above the central highlands, and it carries glaciers almost exactly on the Equator. What you are looking at is not the original mountain. This was once a volcano taller than Kilimanjaro, and what is left is the hard core of its vent, weathered down to rock. The two highest points, Batian and Nelion, are bare spires that still take ropes; Point Lenana, at 4,985 metres, is the one you can reach on foot. The first climbers to get up here, in 1899, named all three after a Maasai seer called Mbatian, his brother and his son. A dozen small ice fields hang under the summits, and they are expected to be gone within decades.
The Naro Moru trail climbs out of forest and bamboo onto open moorland, and this is the strangest stretch of the walk. Giant groundsels stand above the tussock grass like still figures, taller than you are, surviving equatorial nights that drop below freezing by wrapping themselves in their own dead leaves. Each rosette folds down around the trunk instead of falling, building an insulating collar, with natural antifreeze in the spongy core beneath. Lichen hangs off wet black rock and hyrax whistle from the boulders. Higher up the grass gives out for scree and frost-shattered stone, with the summit massif rearing close, and the trail ends at the wooden sign for Mackinder's Camp. Summit morning starts around three, up rock in the dark to Point Lenana, where you come out over a frozen tarn with dark spires falling away toward the plains and the ranges beyond going blue in the haze. The way down follows a broad valley the vanished glaciers scooped out. To the Kikuyu this peak is Kirinyaga, the place of brightness and the home of Ngai the creator, and the name of the country is a worn-down echo of that word. Houses in these highlands are still built with their doorways facing it.