Old Ilmorog
Ilmorog is often described as dry, bleak, and rural; its young men are said to leave it for the city, and the children who stay are dirty and besieged by flies. The residents live in huts, and a bicycle is viewed as an extraordinary icon of modernity. It is a place in the hinterlands, a place that is quiet but gossipy, failing but stubbornly clinging to life. This is a place that so desperately needs help, but when "help" comes, it utterly transforms the village.
The Journey
The journey to Nairobi is depicted as an epic one: long, tiring, and difficult, but imbued with a sense of monumentality and import. Like all pilgrims traveling long distances for important reasons, they vacillate between suffering and elation, seeing their quest to speak with Nderi as a profound collective action that would no doubt bear fruit. Nearly all the images of epic journeys are here—the ailing child, the search for water, the late-night storytelling, the wandering under the moon—and these images help give gravitas to the tale.
The City
The city is depicted in contrast to Ilmorog. It is busy and loud, densely packed with all manner of people. It is much more modern, with the narrator noticing, for example, a Hilton hotel. The houses are large, the people are well-dressed, and the travelers are woefully out of place in their provincialism and raggedness. The people they seek or talk to in the city—Kimeria, Rev. Jerrod Brown, Nderi, Chui—are vastly different than them in the way they talk, dress, and behave; there is a suggestion of moral laxity in the confluence of such elements.
New Ilmorog
Ngugi uses powerful imagery of technology, modernization, capitalism, and change to show how New Ilmorog differs from the old. He writes of machines carving up the earth, tools strewn about, mud and detritus, neon lights, large buildings, shantytowns bordering wealthy neighborhoods, the ever-present Road, exhausted laborers, etc. All of this gives the impression of rapid and sometimes disconcerting change, which is reflected in the main characters' internal states.
