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With the sun barely over the edge of the valley, the colours on the hills were muffled. The banana leaves were dull green, the sugar cane stalks pale yellow. And so the flames, when we saw them flare in first one house, then a second, then streets and streets on fire, were shocking, vivid orange, more alive than anything around.

I arrived in Mau Summit, a small town on a main road in Kenya's Great Rift Valley, just after dawn on Thursday morning. It had been burning for a couple of hours. At the sight of the flames, my driver, Mohammed AbuBakr, instinctively sped up. But in the centre of town, we found a police truck and a half-dozen officers and we stopped.

There were people all along the side of the road, but no one spoke. The only sound was the dull thud as they flipped over the fallen tin sheets that used to be roofs, looking for anything to salvage. The sight of the ruins seemed to stun people into silence.

I climbed through the rubble and held out a hand to a young man who stood in the smouldering remains of his small electronics shop. "Pole, pole sana," I said, Kiswahili for "very sorry," a phrase I had been using incessantly in the past few days. There was nothing to save, no trace of the 300,000 shillings — $4,350 — that Jose Muiruri, 25, had saved up and invested. Next door was the shell of his family's house.

Then it got worse: Behind it, he found the body of a young woman. She was so badly burned that he could not tell who she was; her skirt and sweater were reduced to ash. But the baby, perhaps a year old, whom she clutched to her chest, small head tucked beneath her chin, was still discernible. Mr. Muiruri looked, and turned away. There was no one to help, nowhere to take their bodies. He needed to gather his family and get out.

"Last evening we heard noises, and we thought there was something planned, so we just stayed in the shop watching," he said. "But then a group came — so many, 20 in one group, 30 in another — and you could not recognize them, and they told us we must leave this place. So we turned and just ran for our life."

His family and many others ran to a gas station at the edge of town, where a few police officers had been posted in the convulsion of violence that has racked Kenya since a disputed presidential election on Dec. 27. The police called for reinforcements, but by the time they arrived an hour later, a mob of young men armed with bows and arrows and jerry cans of fuel had set the once-bustling town on fire.

Police tried to talk to the mob leaders, but the mob shot arrows, a traditional weapon of the Kalenjin, who are numerous in this area, toward the police and shop owners, most of them Kikuyu, and kept them at bay, until the shops and bars and the small hotels were all ablaze. Then they melted back into the valley.

"They were telling us to go, go," Mr. Muiruri said. "To go back where we are from." I asked where that was. He gave a bitter smile. "I was born just there," he said, pointing up the road. "But they say we are invaders and we have taken something of theirs."

It was a story I had heard a dozen times in the previous couple of days. Some 800 people are dead, 300,000 are displaced in Kenya now, and millions of dollars worth of property has been destroyed. And in nearly every case, the story is that anger over cheating in the presidential election has caused people who have lived side by side for decades to turn on each other in a vicious frenzy, shooting and beating and burning, and driving them from land and homes they have occupied for generations.

The Kenya I travelled through this week was not a country I recognized from more than a decade of travel here, the Kenya that was prospering and ambitious and dignified and peaceful. No one I have met seems able to believe that they have found themselves here — or able to imagine a way out.

This crisis is about much more than the election. Anger at vote-rigging has worked to rip a thin scab off many years of frustration at poverty, corruption and inequitable land ownership that dates from the colonial era. A handful of politicians have seized on ethnicity (Kenya has 37 different ethnic groups) as the most efficient way of mustering support, and incited people to "protect their own." There is evidence that some degree of ethnic-based violence was planned before the vote, that opposition supporters wanted revenge against government supporters if they won, and anarchy if they didn't.

Mr. Muiruri and his family are Kikuyu, whose "traditional" homeland is in the centre of the country. Thousands of Kikuyu came into the valley in the 1950s to work on the farms set up by white settlers, or to set up small businesses. The Kikuyu had the first contact with the British colonists, and were the first to learn to read. They parlayed their slim advantages into the purchase of modest parcels of land.

Independent Kenya's first independence president, Jomo Kenyatta, was a Kikuyu, and he encouraged his own people to move and take opportunities to prosper. He was succeeded by 27 years of dictatorship under Daniel arap Moi, a Kalenjin. By the end of his rule, Mr. Moi was despised by Kenyans in every tribe. In 2002, he was replaced by Mwai Kibaki, another Kikuyu, who won office in an election considered relatively fair.

Mr. Kibaki has presided over a growing economy, a flourishing civil society — and some profoundly corrupt dealings. Many of those in the political elite that surround him and who have grown rich in the past five years are also Kikuyu.

It is now clear that although both Mr. Kibaki's camp and that of opposition leader Raila Odinga cheated in the Dec. 27 vote, Mr. Kibaki's group inflated their tally more. Mr. Kibaki had himself instantly sworn in again, banned live media and called out security forces. Mr. Odinga's supporters, to whom all polls had given a narrow lead, reacted with rage.

Yet somehow the explosion of anger focused not on the abrogation of democracy, but on ethnicity. Marshals in Mr. Odinga's camp began to say that "the Kikuyu" had stolen their election, that Mr. Kibaki was intent on assuring that only Kikuyu, who make up 22 per cent of the population, would prosper, that they would never cede power. Marshals in Mr. Kibaki's camp told the Kikuyu that others resentful of their industry and prosperity were intent on destroying them, and only loyalty to the government would save what they had. Police, meanwhile, had shoot-to-kill orders, and unarmed protesters were shot in the back, further inflaming the opposition.

In an effort to understand this, how one of Africa's most stable countries could have gone so quickly up in flames, I set out from Nairobi for the Great Rift Valley. This area voted resoundingly — no rigging required, though some provided — for Mr. Odinga.

The area is dominated by non-Kikuyu tribes and has seen only limited economic development in the past 10 years. Where many white settlers made vast fortunes here and lived the gin-drinking, cricket-playing life of luxury immortalized in books and films such as Out of Africa, today it is home to smallholders and legions of young, unemployed people.

I had one destination in particular in mind: the Cistercian monastery in Kipkelion, where a mob of 1,500 people besieged the 600 or so of their neighbours sheltering there last weekend, vowing to kill them all. I wanted to talk to the people in the monastery, and I wanted to find some members of the mob to ask, "What's happened here?"

ON THE ROAD TO KIPKELION I arranged to travel with Mr. AbuBakr and his colleague from a community radio station in the Nairobi slum Kibera, Muchiri Kioi, a former reporter with the BBC Kiswahili service. Mr. Kioi is half Kikuyu, the group most targeted in the valley, and he was both curious and nervous about going there. He instructed us, grinning but serious, to call him Suleiman Salim — from now on, he was a Muslim opposition supporter.

From Nairobi, we drove to the regional capital of Nakuru and started to gather information about the safety of the roads. A local Kalenjin man, recommended by friends, would show us the route and talk us through military checkpoints on the way. We stocked up on food, water and cellphone air time, and set off.

Not long out of Nakuru, the road degenerated into a stone track, and I began to be deeply uneasy. There was no one. Not a woman with a bundle on her head, not a child in a school uniform, no men on bicycles, none outside the shops, all of which were locked tight. There was not a cow, a goat, a chicken.

Instead, all we passed where the hastily assembled roadblocks: boulders, felled electrical poles, piles of logs.

Two hours shuddering down that road and our truck suddenly slammed to a stop, engine dead. The men tinkered, with increasing anxiety. As the minutes ticked by, I tasted the flat metal of fear in my mouth. My cellphone rang: it was Father Dominic Nkoyoyo at the monastery. Armed youth were amassing in the road, he said, sealing it off. We should turn back as fast as we could.

The nearest town, Kipkelion, was ahead, so we began to push the truck, first up a hill, and then, fortunately, down. A vehicle stuffed to the roof with panicked refugees chugged by, and I pleaded my way on, hoping that in Kipkelion I might find help. We reached the town half an hour later and I began asking everyone I could find for a mechanic. The town was full of Kikuyu refugees, and there were several mechanics — but no one was willing to leave, not for any amount of shillings. When I asked, they simply held up their arms and mimed the action of shooting an arrow. I had given up in despair when Mr. AbuBakr and the others rolled the lifeless Land Cruiser into the town.

While they continued their efforts to repair it, I walked into the refugee camp that had sprung up around the police barracks. Some 800 people were sheltering there in improvised tents, many with nothing at all. I met Andrea Momonyi, 65, who had somehow contrived to keep his grey-and-white pinstripe blazer immaculate in the mud of the camp. Originally from the centre of the country, Mr. Momonyi came here in 1975, and bought his two-hectare farm from a settler. "I grew tomatoes, sugar cane, cabbage and maize," he said. "The children went to school, and I could grow our food and a bit extra to have some money. It was fine."

In the early evening of Dec. 30, just hours after the presidential results were announced, he looked out his front window to see a crowd so large he couldn't count the men in it. They carried bows and arrows. "They chased us, and we ran for our dear lives."

The mob set his house ablaze, and the granary full of maize, and all the fields. He ran, with his children, to the police station, and has been there since.

"We'd been co-existing happily together and I never expected this," he said, something person after person in the camp would tell me. "We were working together, living in the same places, going to the same drinking places."

And yet it was clear that Mr. Momonyi and everyone else knew the mobs that torched their houses contained their Kalenjin neighbours. And when pressed, they admitted they were not entirely caught off guard by recent events. I asked Mr. Momonyi about the land title documents for his farm — many suspect that one goal of the arson campaign is to get people off land, destroy their deeds and then move in and establish de facto ownership. But Mr. Momonyi still had his deed. In the early 1990s, when relations were tense and he thought the Kalenjin might come for his farm, he took the title documents out of the valley for safe-keeping. "We think it is a plot, hatched before the election," he said.

That thesis is now supported in most quarters. The violence that broke out in the Rift Valley hours after the results were announced was of a level of co-ordination and sophistication, such as trenches dug with tractors to keep security services off the roads, that it cannot have been spontaneous.

Which leaves Mr. Momonyi living under a sheet of grey ď plastic on damp earth at a police garrison. Could he go back home if the situation became more stable? He shook his head, and the crowd that had gathered to listen to our conversation chorused, "No" We will never feel safe again, people said. But where will he go? At this, Mr. Momonyi twisted his cane in his hands. "I have only that piece of land."

When I walked out of the camp, I found our truck running at last. But already it was nearing dark, so we weren't leaving Kipkelion. A kind nun named Sister Anna Peter, who drives the mobile clinic for the Our Lady of Mercy mission, offered us narrow beds and blankets in the Catholic mission.

I wanted to know just who the refugees were so afraid of. So as night fell, we climbed the hill on the edge of town, looking for some Kalenjin. It didn't take long for a group of Kalenjin men to materialize out of the darkness. They said that the refugees such as Mr. Momonyi were liars. There had been no burning, no forced displacements. If the Kikuyu were seeking shelter from the police, it was because they had been killing Kalenjin and feared reprisal.

The men returned, over and over, to the topic of the election, the victory stolen from their candidate, whom they, like most Kenyans, call just Raila. "It's very painful to be deprived of this," said David Langaat, 58. He pointed to the local clinic, which he said lacked drugs and staff, and to the horrendous road. "It was our wish to have some change, some economic development."

Yet why should the theft of the election set neighbours against each other? They could not answer, shrugging silently. And so we went back down the hill — passing, on the way, a small group of young men carrying machetes, on their way to staff a roadblock.

Back at the mission, before we slept, Sister Anna Peter tried to answer that question. "When anger comes in, as with the election, people reflect on what else went on before," she said. "And the anger for ownership of land spills in. That anger has been a long time brewing. Everyone thinks of land; they want that one thing."

Before first light, we were back in the truck: We wanted to be well on the road before the roadblock militias had, as Mr. Kioi put it, "had some sleep and some tea and come out to work." For the first hour or so, as light crept into the valley, the roads were empty. And then we hit Mau Summit and the fire.

We did not loiter long. The police captain told us we were mad to proceed. But staying put wasn't appealing either. So on we went. Ten, 20, 30 kilometres, and things were fine.

And then, there it was, the scene I had been picturing, expecting around each bend. A row of vehicles stopped and trying to turn. A series of logs and rocks across the road. And on the other side, a crowd of perhaps 200 men, all of them clearly armed.

What I hadn't imagined was the next part: All the people attempting to get to Nakuru or Nairobi fell upon our truck. They had seen our vehicle, with the "International Press" signs taped to the windows. "Go, talk to them." The theory, it seemed, was that the chance to talk to someone, even a lone white reporter, might ease the tension of the gathering mob, and persuade them to open the road.

I stepped down from the car, and in an act of much greater bravery, so did Mr. Kioi. "Remember: Suleiman Salim," he hissed. I grabbed a notebook, camera, two pens, press card. He took his microphone. And we began to step over the logs and rocks toward the mob.

As we drew near the crowd of men, the buzz increased. I thought I might vomit. I walked into the middle of them and said loudly, "I work for a Canadian newspaper. I need to know who is in charge here. I would like to know what's going on." The crowd quieted slightly, moved back a little.

"No one is in charge," one man said. "We are all together." I noticed that every man carried a bow, made of yellow wood and almost his own height, and an arrow. It was hard to believe they were real weapons. A young man with a whole quiver of arrows, metal tips gleaming in the sunlight, jostled roughly against me. "Do you have a spokesman?" I asked, aware of my own absurdity. "No, no spokesman," came the angry response. "Well, what are you doing?" I asked desperately. "We are angry because they killed our people," one young man said. I held out my hand. "I'm Stephanie. I work for a newspaper in Canada called The Globe and Mail." He let my hand hang there, staring at me coldly. I waited, waited. Finally, Kenyan politesse outweighed his rage and he shook.

His named was Sammy Kirui and he was 30. He told me that in the night, some Kikuyu had come and torched a shop. When the alarm was raised, two young Kalenjin men, unarmed, had come from the hill to investigate. Police had shot them, he said. "We were preaching peace," he said. Until that night there had been no trouble in their town, Sachangwan. "But how can we always preach peace and they come and kill us?" The police chief is Kisi, a tribe from a different part of Kenya. "Instead of giving us backup, he is making matters worse."

These men spoke about their bitterness that Mr. Kibaki will not admit he rigged the vote. But what did that have to do with pointing bows and arrows at people in the road, I asked? With chasing Kikuyu out of town? "These people are very insulting," Mr. Kirui said. I asked him what he did for a living. "Nothing, I don't work," he said. "These people won't hire you for their business. There is nothing for ¡K us."

While we were talking, the distraction had worked just as the crowd behind the roadblock had hoped. They had pulled back the logs and surged past us.

Now buses of travellers coming the other way pulled up, and the men with weapons began to pound the windows. "We need to go," Mr. Kioi said. Then he yelled it. Then he was running for the vehicle. I followed, pressing the shutter on my camera as I ran. The vehicle was moving when I got in. "They were saying," Mr. Kioi wheezed, "in their language that now they need to kill someone. That they should shoot someone through the window of the bus."

As we drove away, I realized that men with bows and arrows stood in lines on every ridge and along the road. A small group of police were standing, utterly ineffectual, at the edge of the mob. This part of Kenya, it seemed, was now lawless.

The next stretch of road was clear. And then, when it seemed we might actually be fine, we ran out of gas. There had been nowhere to refuel because every gas station had been torched. When the truck finally heaved to a stop, we were on the edge of Salgaa, a truck stop thick with bars and brothels. There had not been fuel there for weeks.

Mr. AbuBakr set off on the back of a motorbike with a jerry can, bound for a town five kilometres away rumoured to have fuel. An hour later, he returned empty-handed. The gas station would sell him none, convinced that he was bent on arson. But he had filled the tank of the motorbike, and now set about the laborious task of siphoning the gas into our truck.

As he worked, the town became choked with transport trucks, ranged four across the road as drivers debated whether it was safe to go on or safe to go back. When we rolled out, few were moving. Less than an hour after we left Salgaa, mobs set the town and many of the trucks alight.

Our nine litres of gas got us to Nakuru, and when we arrived there, there was no hint of trouble. Mothers took children in their best clothes out for lunch and a couple of tourists, brave or clueless, headed out to see the flamingos. The only sign of the trouble was at the fairgrounds, where several thousand refugees were sleeping in the buildings and on the playing fields. Dozens more were arriving, thinking they would be safe in Nakuru.

But on Thursday night, hours after we left, not long after Mr. Odinga said on national television that he is the "rightful president," the fighting spread here. Yesterday, Kikuyus began revenge attacks with machetes; local reporters described bodies lying in the streets, some with deep gashes, some studded with arrows.

In the afternoon, we left Nakuru for Nairobi, where former United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan was performing frantic shuttle diplomacy between Mr. Kibaki and Mr. Odinga. He managed that day to get them in the same room for the first time since the vote. But Mr. Kibaki and his cabinet are entrenching their hold on power, while Mr. Odinga refuses to entertain any deal that doesn't name him president. It is difficult to imagine a compromise that Mr. Annan could broker.

And if he did, what impact would it have in Kipkelion? "It will take some time," Father Nkoyoyo said with priestly understatement, "because now people are wounded and the wounds can't be healed tomorrow. The people can't go back and rebuild somewhere where the neighbours tried to kill them. It is going to take more than some months or even years."

On the climb out of the valley from Nakuru to Nairobi, I asked Mr. Kioi and Mr. AbuBakr if anything we had seen surprised them. "That this is Kenya, and you cannot move from place to place," Mr. Kioi said, bitter wonderment in his voice. "That there is no control. That people are killing just like anything."