Despite government claims to have arranged and secured a truce by boosting the police presence in the region, streams of people -- most of them from the Kikuyu tribe -- were still arriving at a makeshift camp here in the shadows of the Mount Longonot volcano.

More than 2,000 displaced Kikuyu are now in Mai Mahiu township while a large but undetermined number of Maasai tribespeople were reported to have fled their homes for Narok, further west.

The fighting, which started on Friday, pits crudely armed tribal warriors from the nomadic Maasai against Kikuyu farmers in the Mai Mahiu region, about 60 kilometers (35 miles) northwest of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.

"We have lost everything," said John Kinyanjui, a small-scale farmer, as despairing Kikuyu tribesmen roamed the dusty, crime-ridden Mai Mahiu township.

"We are now hoping the government will protect us and help us," he told AFP.

Meanwhile, Maasais -- mostly frail women and children too tired to trek any further -- set up camps in the Kigesha region, a barren land about 10 kilometers (six miles) west of the trading post.

The road to the popular Maasai Mara game reserve, which had been blocked over the weekend, remained closed Monday after several Maasai were pulled from minibuses and stabbed to death.

Government officials on the ground said they had recovered the bodies of 17 people but Rift Valley Provincial Commissioner Wilson Ndolo could confirm only 15 deaths, up one from Sunday's toll.

Ndolo told AFP that government officials had mediated a truce between the Kikuyu and the Maasai and that displaced villagers were beginning to trickle back to their homes.

"We brokered a ceasefire yesterday (Sunday) at 2 p.m. (1100 GMT) and we have deployed police officers to ensure that it holds," he said.

"The governnment is going to beef up security in this area," Ndolo told several hundred displaced Kikuyu. "Let elders from both sides meet and agree to talk peace. Meanwhile, there will a 24-hour patrol."

Most Kikuyu expressed only outrage at the government's failure to stop the clashes in the first place.

In Mai Mahiu people were still leaving their villages as armed gangs of youths, vowing to avenge deaths and property destruction, played cat-and-mouse with the security personnel.

"We are going to mobilise the morans (Maasai tribal warriors) for a revenge mission," fighter Naisho Ole Nkere told AFP while dressed in Maasai war gear and leading a group of about 50 warriors.

Villagers in the camp here said the youths were wielding bows and arrows, machetes, spears, clubs and metal bars and that dozens of people had been wounded in addition to those killed.

Many also spoke of missing family members as war cries reverberated from the hilltops, a launching pad for night raids.

The weekend fighting, which destroyed several huts, was sparked by Maasai herders invading a farm owned by a local Kikuyu leader accused of diverting water from the Ewaso Kedong river to irrigate his crops.

The Maasai said the diversion had caused a shortage of water downstream for their animals in the dry season.

The Maasai and Kikuyu communities have been at loggerheads over access to water and pasture since the 1960s.

On several occasions Maasai politicians argued that Kenya's first president, himself a Kikuyu, started the fight three decades ago by illegally allocating parcels of land to Kikuyu farmers and denying the Maasai grazing land.

Fighting last week between Maasai and Kipsigis tribesmen near the Maasai Mara game reserve displaced more than 2,000 villagers. A strained truce is still holding.

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