“Lamu” - the very name seduced me.  After the conference in Nairobi, my new Kenyan friends accompanied me as far as Mombasa, a port city on the coast of the Indian Ocean, and showed me where to catch the bus. The bus trundled noisily for four hours, north into what was called “the bush,”  then east as far as it  could go. Then a ferry out to the island. From the boat you could see immense white sand dunes rising out of the blue water, small stone buildings, pink and green minarets poking up from a central thicket of palm trees. Children swam out to meet the ferry. They splashed around in the water like sea otter, calling out “Jambo! Jambo!” I asked a young Italian couple  on board if they knew where they were staying. They named an inexpensive place where people like us -- you know, not exactly tourists -- could find lodgings.

Omar was the owner of the inn. I was 22, and he was about five or six years older than me: very tall, very black, very handsome, blind in one eye. He dressed in simple western clothes but every now and then would show up in a long white robe, Arabian style. He was happy to tell us about the best beaches and places to eat, and seemed to enjoy the interaction with foreigners.

At night, because it was so warm and the evening breezes were so lovely, some of the guests would drag their mattresses up to the roof of the inn, and we would drink chai, watch the sun go down and the moon come up, and talk in low voices late into the night, falling asleep there until the call to prayer from a dozen mosques awakened us at dawn. Sometimes Omar would join us. That was how I learned that although he spoke English and Swahili, Arabic and a sprinkling of European languages, he had never read a book in his life besides the Quran. But you wouldn’t have known it. Because of all the travelers coming through, his knowledge of the world did not seem limited. He could surprise you with what he knew.

One day he offered to take a few of us to a deserted beach on a tiny nearby island. The young Italian couple came along, and some guys who took off on their own as soon as we got there. After we all swam in the delicious warm water, we moved up the beach into the shade of the palm trees. The Italians had a quarrel and the boyfriend went off in search of the other guys. The young woman walked back down to the water’s edge, where she paced slowly back and forth in her bikini, looking at the sand. We watched her, and the slowly curling waves, in silence.

Then Omar said, “She is having her monthly.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“By the way she is walking,” he said.
He told me he wanted to marry a European or American woman.
“Why?” I asked. “The women from this part of the world are so beautiful.”
“Because of the cutting,” he told me. “They cut our women to prepare them for marriage, to keep them pure. I don’t want that. I want my woman to feel pleasure. As I do.”
That was the first time I’d ever heard of female circumcision, as we call it in the west. A stunning comment, in retrospect, given who he was, and where he was, so many decades ago.

Towards the end of the week, over tea on the hotel veranda, Omar mentioned that he owned another house in a small fishing village on the other side of the island. Did I want to go visit? Very few tourists ever got there, he said. He could arrange for a dhow, to sail there in the early part of  the day. Sailing in a dhow! Those beautiful, hand-carved wooden sailboats that made the place Arabian Africa, not the Caribbean, not anywhere else. I met him at the docks the next day, impatient with excitement.

We sailed for about two hours to the other side of the island. The turquoise sea was clear and full of life.

Centuries ago, the the city of Lamu had been in the crossroads of trade between Arabia and Africa. It had two-story buildings with finely crafted wooden doors, stone sewage canals along the streets, and many mosques. It was famous for having nurtured a whole school of women poets in generations past. But the interior of the island was undeveloped, nothing but dunes and scrub, palm trees and areas of jungle. We anchored at a wooden dock on a beach and wandered through a sleepy village that was more like the rest of rural Kenya: babies rolling around with puppies on earthen clearings and women working till their men came home. The pale dust swallowed what sound there was.

The afternoon was stretching on and the salt air provoked hunger. We went inside the sole corner store to see about a meal, and there was nothing on the shelves but tins of Nescafe and Nestle baby formula. When we arrived at Omar’s house, there was no food there either, because it was a virgin house, completed and then locked, awaiting inhabitants.

“I built this house,” Omar said proudly, “for my future bride.”

It was a lovely house of cement and stone, spacious and cool with a more permanent feeling than the mud and stick shacks of his neighbors. In one room, a double bed with a beautifully carved wooden headboard awaited. There was no other furniture. I  nodded respectfully.
We took seats on overturned buckets in the patio, under a mimosa tree. He looked like he was collecting his thoughts.
“I have decided,” he said finally, “to ask my grandmother’s permission to marry you.”
“Omar,” I said. “You barely know me.”
“I know enough,” he said.”My instincts are sound.”
“No,” I contested. “I mean besides all that. There are things you don’t know about me.”
“Like what?”
I struggled to force out the necessary truth.
“Like, I am Jewish.”
He went all silent and a slow chill raised the blonde hairs on my arms, the back of my neck. I wondered if I had made a bad mistake. Then he went, “Ah.”
I waited.
“So that’s why,” he said at last.
“Why what?”
“Why I feel so close to you,” he said, smiling kindly.
“Close to me?” I repeated, not understanding. “A Jew?”
“Which is close to me,” he said, “a Muslim.  We are already cousins.”

I looked down and drew signs in the dirt with a twig of fallen mimosa. I can’t say his words did not make me feel warm.
“This is a decision I cannot make,” I lied. “I must go home and ask my father.”
Omar went very still. Then he nodded, reluctantly.

My hunger had grown too strong to ignore and I changed the subject.
“What are we going to do?” I asked. “There’s nothing in this village. What do people eat?”
“Wait for me here,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

Africa teaches you nothing so well as how to wait .To get there I had waited hours in the broiling sun for the ferry to come, with nothing to drink but re-boiled chai from a roadside stand. The Masai herders of the high country wait on one leg for their cows to find nourishment in the scrub grass. The mothers wait for the fishing boats to dock. So I waited as I was shown.

Eventually he came back with something to eat. It was a spectacular blue crab, still alive. The body was small with a bright yellow underside, but it had substantial legs, maybe 12 inches long. He had bought it off a fisherman at the docks. We would wait some more a until a pot was fetched, the water boiled, and the creature cooked. I have never tasted a more delicious thing from the sea.

By then, the light was changing, and an afternoon breeze lifted the stupor of the afternoon. I licked my fingers until there was nothing left for an ant to savor, then looked at him.
“When is the boat back?”
He registered surprise.
“There is no boat tonight,” he said.
I did not fear Omar. But something new stirred in me, something that wasn’t there before.
“What do you mean, no boat back,” I asked carefully.
“There will be a boat leaving in the morning,” he said.
“Did you know that before we came?”
He was noncommittal.
“You didn’t tell me that,” I said.
We sat there as I turned this new fact over.
“What is your thinking?” I asked, so as not to challenge him directly.
He shrugged. “We’ll spend the night.”
“Omar,” I said. He looked at me, more testily than before.
“We have no choice,” he said.
“Oh, I think we do,” I said. “There is always a choice. There has to be.”
He suddenly looked tired, as if I were no longer his traveler friend, nor potential bride, but just another demanding tourist. He still didn’t budge. I stood up.
“How will we get back?” I demanded. “Because I am not spending the night here. It’s not what I signed up for and not what I would expect of you, as my host.”
And I stood there, my legs firm, turning panic to steel.

He sighed, a long, heavy sigh, and stood up. He pulled on his sandals, reached for whatever he had brought - his head cloth, his knife -- and started walking out of the compound. At first I thought that he was going to leave me there.Then he stopped, turned around, and with a jerk of his head told me to follow. I walked hesitantly, alongside and slightly behind him. His long white robe billowed against my ankles. Soon we came to the edge of the town. With one long hand he gestured toward the dunes stretching all the way across the island to Lamu, pink with sharp, purple shadows in the last light of the day.The other he held out to me.

“This is the only way back,” he said. I couldn’t even see a path.

I had a moment there. I could see myself following him into the dunes, never to be seen again by anyone who knew me. Or, I could decide to trust him, an honorable Muslim, and end up safely in my hotel bed, albeit in the early hours of the morning.

I wondered whether this forced a revision of my beliefs, such that there was, in fact, no real choice, only surrender. Then I put my hand in his.

Feature image used with a Fotopedia Non-Commercial Attribution license by Stanislav Lvovsky,