He was under a tiny patch of shade under a tree in one of the earth’s remotest spots. At Nadapal, the Kenya–South Sudan border, you might expect to meet the ghost of Chatwin, but not a dead ringer for Peter Sellers dying of thirst.
‘You English? Ach great,’ he croaked as he loaded his Samsonite suitcase into our Land Rover. ‘I love the English.’
‘Scottish, actually,’ said Ken, at the wheel next to me. I stayed quiet, immediately disliking him.
‘The name’s Eddie.’ He extended a trembling hand. We could see he was very ill. He drank pints and pints of water but wouldn’t eat though he was so clearly starving.
An endless road opened out in front of us, lined by anthills with elephant-trunk chimneys pointed skywards. It was a strange journey. We had passed a truck shot to pieces, still smoking; a freshly dead hyena with its eyes open crouched in the road, a circle of tribesmen squatting in the dust, their skins scarred into the patterns of crocodile hides.
The night before, we’d stopped in the desert and seen a flickering luminescence I can’t explain. Ken said it was caused by the Snake Star, which local people believe falls from heaven. This ‘star’ grows like a fungus and is fed on by adders which then exhale fire.
I asked Eddie, ‘Where are you going?’
I angled the side mirror so that I could keep a watch on his face, which was blistered with extreme sunburn. Not only did he look like Sellers, but he spoke like Clare Quilty in Lolita, except with a South African clip.
‘Cairo, Cairo, yah, I’m going to Cairo. Do you think I can hitch?’
‘That’s 2,000 miles away!’ I swung round to look at him. ‘Why didn’t you fly?’
‘No money, you see.
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