Word reached Ogeto first. Then Miller called and asked if I was down to go to Marsabit. I called Odede. Two days later, we were on the road. We thought it’d take eight hours, but Marsabit greeted us early, the sun still stretching awake. We thought we were close. We weren’t. Eight kilometres of tarmac out of 270 stretched ahead, a mere fragment of what lay before us, making us realise how much farther we had to go. The Huri Hills rose like ghosts, silent and vast, a beauty that both slowed and propelled us.
Near Dukana, on the Kenyan-Ethiopian border, Guyo is getting married tomorrow. We are here to witness, to document. Guyo shares the details, each one more deliberate than the last. The Gabra, wanderers of the Chalbi desert, measure time by the lunar calendar. A day doesn’t start when the sun rises but when your shadow shifts at 2 p.m. The wedding stretches through the night, past sleep. Guyo won’t see his bride until 4 a.m., not until the songs have settled and his face is stripped of every hair, his nails cut close. A white robe, stitched the same day, waits for him. After the women have prepared the materials and built a new house for them sacred tree yields its branches. And the bride—her hair shaved at the centre—will walk the camels from the boma, their steps an ancient cadence, their journey a prayer.
Even after the ceremony, silence holds them. Four days without touch, without words. They will share a camel boma, their solitude woven into the fabric of the Gabra. Stars scatter across the desert sky as food is served, brief and quiet. The fire crackles and the weight of tradition settles in the dust around us. Sleep comes lightly in the rocky Chalbi, our dreams tethered to the day to come—a Gabra wedding, timeless as the land, endless as the horizon. The Gabra, whose clans carry the names of stars and sand, whose days fold into the night, whose time is not a line but a loop, circling forever.
