On a Sunday morning last December, my husband and I walked up the curving drive, past a grove of gnarled old trees, toward the low fieldstone house a few miles from Nairobi that Karen Blixen called Mbogani - "house in the woods." It sat before us, basking like a contented old cat in the sunlight and hugged by beds of African lilies and flowering vines. On the horizon, beyond a sweep of green lawn, the Ngong Hills pushed their four rounded blue peaks into the sky.

When you read her book, Out of Africa, written under the pen name of Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen seems part of another time - a lost, long-ago era. Even in the 1950s, when my husband was in the Foreign Service and we lived for two years in Kenya, her life in Africa seemed remote. Blixen was by then a very old woman, living in Denmark. What had once been her coffee farm in Kenya had become the suburb of Karen, named for her. Sprawling villas and manicured gardens had replaced the 6,000 acres of coffee, virgin forest and grasslands that had reached to the foot of the Ngong Hills.

Back then, in the 1950s, her house was still there, but it was occupied by someone else. Blixen's Africa seemed to have disappeared. By the time we returned to spend four months in Kenya last winter, however, the house had become a national museum of Kenya and recently had been opened to the public. A gift from the Danish government, which bought it after Karen Blixen left Africa in 1931, it was presented to the new government of Kenya at the time of independence from Britain. The house and gardens have since been restored to provide a glimpse into a part of Kenya's past.

Behind the house, on the flagstone terrace facing the Ngong Hills, are the two round stone tables and stone benches where Karen Blixen paid her Kikuyu. farm workers and held her daily medical clinics. Even before we entered the house, I had a strong sense of her presence and easily could imagine her coming through the open French doors, pen in hand, or strolling across the lawn with her favorite deerhound.

Inside, too, the rooms seemed full of her, even the empty dining room that opens out onto the terrace, with only the lacy curtains stirring in the breeze and the sound of Mozart playing in the background.

By the window in the mahogany-paneled study with its cedar parquet floor, she wrote her letters from Africa. This room, and several others, are empty of furniture now, but the Kenya Museum Society hopes to raise enough money to furnish them again.

In the living room are the two lanterns Karen Blixen hung outside the front door to let her lover, Denys Finch Hatton, know she was at home. The small ceramic turkey he gave her sits on the stone mantelpiece nearby. They, and the carved wooden table, are the only original pieces in the room. A reproduction of her tiny old-fashioned typewriter is on the desk beside an ancient tall telephone. The young guide explained that both were gifts to the museum from the film company that made Out of Africa.

A lion skin with a black-maned head and bared teeth lies on the living room floor, guarding the door. Bookcases line one wall. They contain some of Blixen's books as well as many that belonged to Finch Hatton, who had the shelves built when he moved from Nairobi to live at the farm. The gold lettering on the books gleams dully on bindings darkened by time. I was unable to read the titles from behind the velvet rope that seals off that part of the room.

Beyond the living room is her bedroom, where a pair of tall riding boots stands on the floor. Hanging on the bedpost is a wide-brimmed felt hat. A pair of jodhpurs is flung across the white lace bedspread. Next door is her husband, Bror’s, bedroom—later Finch Hatton’s room, after the Blixens separated and Bror moved out. The original wardrobe, masculine and massive, looms against one wall.

Outside on the vine-shaded veranda we sank back on a comfortable bench and took time to absorb the deep peace of the "house in the woods." In the hot sun beyond the veranda the wide expanse of grass sloped toward a distant fringe of trees. Cloud shadows slid in shifting patterns across the Ngong Hills whose "four noble peaks," in Blixen's words, were "like immovable darker blue waves against the sky. "

My husband and I walked those hills one Sunday in February with a group from the National Museum. It was cold, at 8,000 feet, with a gale blowing streamers of mist across the hills. Between meadows of prickly heather and gorse and carpets of wildflowers, we followed the foot-path that threads the crest of the hills, swooping into the saddles, then winding back up the rocky trail to the next summit--the same narrow game-path described in Out of Africa, which ran "along the ridge, up and down the peaks, like a gentle switchback . . ."

It seemed anything but gentle to us.

A few days later we returned, in our rented car, to visit the site of Denys Finch Hatton's grave. After his fatal plane crash he had been buried in the hills at a spot he and Blixen had selected. We followed a dirt road, twisting and turning along the shoulders of the hills and down into some of the green cultivated valleys among small homesteads and farms. Cows grazed peaceably on the hillsides, wildflowers bloomed beside the road, and we caught our breath at unexpected vistas of mountains and far savannahs when the road climbed and circled the hills.

A signboard on the right-hand side of the road said simply: Denys George Finch Hatton. An arrow pointed up a rutted track that ascended for a few hundred feet beneath a leafy archway of trees.

The grave is on a level stretch of ground with the hillside falling away below. It is peaceful and quiet, with a long view across green foothills to endless plains under the vast arc of the African sky. Off to the north, on a clear day, the Aberdare Mountains are blue in the distance. And, if you are lucky and its misty veil parts, you will also see the jagged, snowy peak of Mt. Kenya, one hundred miles away, hanging suspended above low clouds on the horizon like an icy mirage.

A rustic board fence surrounds the grave. Outside it, beside the grassy parking area, are two picnic tables for visitors. Miniature thatched roofs provide shelter from sun and rain.

We lifted the gate latch and walked along tiny neat paths between rectangles of grass, flowering shrubs and beds filled with a welter of English flowers: yellow and white daisies, pink cosmos, blood-red zinnias, scarlet and coral geraniums.

In the center of the enclosure a slender stone obelisk reaches skyward. The inscription is brief:

Finch Hatton would probably be startled to find himself surrounded by flourishing fields of maize and bananas and herds of cattle and goats, where lions once roamed in thick forest and high grasslands.

I had lingered for a while in Blixen's house, had breathed in the fragrances from her garden, had experienced the quiet solitude of Finch Hatton's grave, and had seen from the top of the Ngong Hills the "landscape that had not its like in all the world." I had, after all, discovered at least a small part of Blixen’s Africa.