Chapter One
The Station That Refused
The dead line had been giving Shiru Kamau exactly what dead lines give for eleven kilometres, which is botany.
She had walked worse. The Highlands Railway's iron was mostly where the century had left it, ballast swallowed in kikuyu grass, sleepers gone to termites in the wet sections, the forest making its slow legal claim on the cuttings, and Shiru and Juma had surveyed it chain by chain in the high cool sunlight, drone up, notes running, the standard archaeology of a heritage revival: what the years had taken, what could be won back, what it would cost.
Then the line came round the shoulder of the hill at kilometre twelve, out of the forest dark into the full green blaze of the tea country, and Juma, walking point, stopped dead and said, in the voice of a young man whose drone photographs have just been outperformed by the actual world, "Engineer. You need to see the curve."
The curve was the reason the old surveyors had brought the line this way at all, a long open sweep above the whole quilted valley, tea gardens falling away plantation on plantation to the blue haze of the Rift. And set into the curve, where the 1913 drawings put it, was Kilima Halt.
