F E A T U R E S Sleepless in L.A. By Don George, Editor Giving good gnocchi A five-course seduction in Venice By Linda Watanabe McFerrin - Books on Venice - Getting there Meeting Moses on Mount Sinai By Deb Fellner - Getting there D E P A R T M E N T S Postmark: Lamu God's Wake-up Call in Kenya By Don Meredith Passages: On China's Yangtze: "The River at the Center of the World" By Simon Winchester Table Talk - Boycott Burma? Salon Taste Adventures in eating - - - - - - - - Your virtual travel agency - - - - - - - - E A R L I E R Tuesday April 15 My Favorite Flick By Don George, Editor Las Vegas By Cynthia Gorney Postmark: Bangkok By Steve Van Beek Passages: "Under the Tuscan Sun" By Frances Mayes Readers' Tips and Tales A full list of all Wanderlust articles

god's wake-up call in Kenya + O f A l l a h a n d i b i s e s : M o r n i n g b l e s s i n g s o n a n A f r i c a n i s l a n d + BY DON MEREDITH | “allah Akbar!” 4:30 a.m. Reveille. A muezzin urges Lamu's Muslim faithful to slip from their beds, leave their sleeping women and begin the morning's ablutions. "Aaaaaallaaaaahaaaa Ak-bar!" No prerecorded message broadcast on a tinpot speaker, but a lucid adolescent alto sailing over the housetops, rising distant and clear from some small, nameless mosque south of town, where mud and wattle shanties fringe the dunes. The notes soar for breathless minutes, swell and subside, and on the dying fall are taken up by a lyric tenor rendering his aria from the Riyadha Mosque or the Mwenye Alawi: "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet ..." The hot season begins and the breeze that normally cools Lamu shifts from an easterly kaskazi to a southerly kusi. It slips past the crenelated parapet surrounding my rooftop terrace, missing my sleeping platform entirely. I sweat through an eternal, sultry night and wake in a salty pool. One thought cheers me: The kusi brings the "long rains," heavy storms preceding the cool season. They've already begun inland, ending a drought that brought hunger to upcountry tribes, the Gabbra, Turkana and the water-starved Somalis of Garissa and Wajir. While the muezzin's call still echoes, I fall into a feverish doze. Lamu throbs and, under a tent of mosquito netting, I sweat through fitful dreams. "Hamid! Hamid!" cries a voice through my slumber. "Hamid!" A sharp banging on a neighbor's door. "Ham-mid!" Abdulla, Hamid's friend, comes, as he does every morning, to waken the hibernating Hamid and rouse him for morning prayers. Hamid finally grumbles that he's awake. I doze again, tossing, sweating. Then jump up with a start. "Allah Akbar! Aaaaaallaaaaahaaaa Ak-bar!" 5:15 a.m. The day officially begins with calls to prayer reverberating from Lamu's two dozen mosques, starting with that nameless little mosque on the dunes south of town, then working inward toward the all-important Pwani Mosque at Lamu's heart. One muezzin begins before another's done. It's a three-part, then four-part round, like "Row, row, row your boat," until a half-dozen muezzins are crying together, their words tumbling unintelligibly in an Arabic cacophony. Curled on the baraza, the built-in bench on the edge of my parapet, I watch the approaching dawn, listen to the last fading cry -- an old man's voice, cracked with age and spiritual ardor, weaving warily from the north, beyond Tundani ("Fruit-Picking Place") and Weyoni ("Donkey Racetrack"), where marabou storks pace the wetlands like funeral directors on stilts, and Lamu buries its dead. Using a tall Arab dalla, I brew coffee, gulp it hot, black and strong. By 6 the battlements of the little Beau Geste fort stand silhouetted against a sky changing swiftly from rich purple to Tiepolo pink. House martins, short-tailed cousins of the swallow, gather high over the market square, flock in rowdy bunches, then burst apart, dashing in a hundred directions after high-flying insects. To the east, a half-mile across Lamu Harbor, Manda Island stews above its mangrove swamps. On the far horizon, over bush and baobabs, banks of cumulus catch fire in the approaching dawn. A solitary kite sails overhead, and roosters, up for hours, strut their rooftop stuff and crow triumphantly. The crows, arrogant in their tuxedo plumage, are the morning masters-of-ceremonies: endlessly raucous, high-stepping tirelessly along palm thatch roofs, bobbing and weaving like avian pugilists on the ragged tops of coconut palms. Below, men in kofia skull caps and snowy kanzus, Lamu's version of the dishdasha and galabieh, shuffle along narrow wandering alleyways to the mosque. From the waterfront, the barkers' calls lure travelers aboard mainland-bound boats: "Wewe! Wewe!" You! Hey, you! "Makowe! Makowe!" The old motorized dhows chug the 10 miles to Makowe's wharf to connect with long-haul buses for the ride to Mombasa. Thanking my stars I'm not making that hot, paralyzing, all-day trip, I pour more coffee. By 6:20 the sun fires the high-piled clouds that turn crimson and orange, then pale to a hot, chrome yellow. I wait. At last a pair of ibis fly over. Then three more, finally a dozen. They wing from their roosts in Manda's mangrove swamps to feed on Tana River's rice paddies. Revered by ancient Egyptians as the embodiment of Toth, the god of wisdom and the inventor of writing, these snowy birds with their odd, down-turned beaks and inky heads are nearly the size of geese. Every morning they make this trek, their wing-beats quick and steady, their peculiar cry so clamorous, so clear. I've named my house for them -- Hijani. Now they're here. I start my day. Hijani -- the morning's blessed. April 22, 1997 Don Meredith lives in a three-story house built around a walled garden in the heart of Lamu's old Swahili town. His work appears frequently in Poets & Writers Magazine and Texas Review.

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