Though the forest region ends as we enter Ulegga, the interval between it and Mtsora is so devoted to cultivation by the natives that it is only at the latter place that we become fully aware that we have entered a new region. Looking towards the W.N.W. we see the commencement of a brown grassy plain, the very duplicate of that extending round the southern end of Lake Albert. In appearance it is as flat as though the level bottom of a lake had just appeared in view and continues thus to the Albert Edward Nyanza.
Between Mtsora and Muhamha we travelled along the edge of the low plain or ancient bed of the northern portion of the Southern Nyanza, but soon after leaving the last village we began to breast the mountains in order to avoid the circuitous route along the plain round the promontory of Sangwé-Mirembé.
As we journeyed towards the south-west over these hills we observed that in the same manner as a change had come over the character of the Semliki Valley the slopes of Ruwenzori had also undergone a similar change. Instead of the thick forests which climbed up the lower slopes and covered the ravines, and wild bananas and wonderful ferneries, and general sappiness and luxuriance of the various species of vegetation, pastoral grass waved on every slope and crest, while a healthful cool breeze caused us to bless our fortune in having parted from the close, heated and moist atmosphere of the Semliki.
But in two days’ march we observed that there was another change. We were in a much drier climate, and the superficial aspect of the country was much as might be expected from a comparatively rainless district—it was that of a worn-out and scorched country. The grass was void of succulency and nutriment. The slopes of the rounded hills presented grooves of a brick-dust colour; here and there grew a stunted tree with wrinkled and distorted branches and ugly olive-green leaves, too surely denoting that the best of the soil had been scoured away or consumed by annual conflagrations, that vegetable life was derived under precarious circumstances despite the copious showers of the rainy season. As these hills, which constitute the southern flank of Ruwenzori, present themselves, the plains below, between their base and Lake Albert Edward, share their meagre, famished, treeless, and uninteresting character. Though the vegetation differs, the gum-trees, such as the acacia, the rigid black euphorbia, the milk weed, are indications of a lean soil and salt-effusing earth, and in reality such is the character of the bed of the receded Nyanza.
In brief words, the north-west and west sides of Ruwenzori, blessed with almost daily rains and with ever-fresh dews, enjoy perpetual spring and are robed in eternal verdure; the south and south-west sides have their well-defined seasons of rain and drought, and if seen during the dry season, no greater contrast can be imagined than these opposing views of nature’s youth and nature’s decay.
There are many doubtless, like myself, who, while gazing upon any ancient work, be it an Egyptian Pyramid or Sphynx, be it an Athenian Parthenon, Palmyrene sun temple, Persepolitan palace, or even an old English castle, will readily confess to feeling a peculiar emotion at the sight. The venerableness of it, which time only can give, its associations with men long ago gathered to their fathers, the builders and inhabiters now quite forgotten, appeal to a certain sympathy in the living. For its history there is a vague yearning; its age awakens something like exultation that we little mortals can build such time-defying structures. But more powerful and higher is that emotion which is roused at the sight of a hoary old mountain like this of Ruwenzori, which we know to be countless thousands of years old. When we think how long it required the melted snow to carve out these ravines, hundreds of fathoms deep, through the rocky cone of the range, or the ages required to spread out the débris from its sides and bosom to cover the Semliki Valley and the Nyanza plains, we are struck dumb at the immeasurableness of the interval between that age when Ruwenzori rose aloft into being; and in reply to the still small voice which seems to ask—“Where wast thou when the foundations of the earth were laid? Declare if thou hast understanding,” we become possessed with a wholesome awe, and can but feel a cheerful faith that it was good for us to have seen it.
Another emotion is that inspired by the thought that in one of the darkest corners of the earth, shrouded by perpetual mist, brooding under the eternal storm-clouds, surrounded by darkness and mystery, there has been hidden to this day a giant among mountains, the melting snow of whose tops has been for some fifty centuries most vital to the peoples of Egypt. Imagine to what a God the reverently-inclined primal nations would have exalted this mountain, which from such a far-away region as this contributed so copiously to their beneficent and sacred Nile. And this thought of the beneficent Nile brings on another. In fancy we look down along that crooked silver vein to where it disports and spreads out to infuse new life to Egypt near the Pyramids, some 4000 miles away, where we beheld populous swarms of men—Arabs, Copts, Fellahs, Negroes, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Frenchmen, English, Germans, and Americans—bustling, jostling, or lounging; and we feel a pardonable pride in being able to inform them for the first time that much of the sweet water they drink, and whose virtues they so often exalt, issues from the deep and extensive snow-beds of Ruwenzori or Ruwenjura—“the Cloud-King.”
