Though from the nearest point to the central range we were distant eight English miles in an air line, during the few brief clear views obtained by us, especially that from Bakokoro, examination through a good binocular informed us of the reason why so much snow was retained on Ruwenzori. As will be seen from the various sketches of the profile, the summit of the range is broken up into many sharp triangular casques or narrow saddle-shaped ridges. Each casque, separately examined, seems to be a miniature copy of the whole range, and dented by the elements, time and weather, wind, rain, frost, and snow, and every side of Ruwenzori appears to represent, though in an acuter degree, the multitudinous irregularities of slopes and crests so characteristic of its mighty neighbours which lie nearest to us, and are fully exposed to the naked eye. Mostly all these triangular casque-like tops of the range are so precipitous that, despite the everlasting snowfalls hardened by the icy winds blowing over their exposed sides and summits, very little snow is seen; but about 300 feet below, as may be estimated, ground more adapted for the retention of the snow is found, which in some parts is so extensive as to represent a vast field. Below this, however, another deep precipice exposes its brown walls, and at the foot of it spreads out another great field of snow joined here and there by sloping ground, and this explains why the side of the range presented to view is not uniformly covered with snow, and why the fields are broken up by the brown patches. For quite 3,000 feet from the summit, as may be seen most clearly from the view obtained from Karimi, there is illustrated a great snowy continent enclosing numerous brown islands.
Naturally where the crests are so steep and naked, and where the walls of the precipices are so lofty, the rough weather to which they are exposed contributes to their dismantling and ruinous crumbling. Fragments of rock and tons of rocky dust and particles tumble from above on the compressed snow-bed below, which imperceptibly moves through the influence of thawing and undermining of the bed by the trickling water, downwards towards the valley a league below. As it descends the thaw increases, and the movement of the snow-bed is more rapid, until, arriving in the neighbourhood of tropic heat, or buried in a great cloud of tepid vapour from the valley beneath, there is a sudden dissolution of the snow, and the rocky fragments, débris and dust, borne by the snow, are hurled downward, crashing through the ravines and over the slopes, until they are arrested in the valley by some obstruction, and form a bank near the debouchure of a ravine, or are scattered over many an acre below the smooth slope of a hill.
Sometimes these ascending fields of snow, by the velocity of their movements, grinding and dragging power, weight and compactness of their bodies, cause extensive landslips, when tracts of wood and bush are borne sheer down, with all the soil which nourished them, to the bed rock, from which it will be evident that enormous masses of material, consisting of boulders, rock fragments, pebbles, gravel, sand trees, plants, and soil, are precipitated from the countless mountain slopes and ravine sides into the valley of the Semliki.
In front of the Rami-lulu River from the mountain there has been at one time some such disastrous pouring of the ruins of a mountain side, so sudden that the river was blocked, the tract there covered about six square miles. Since that time the Rami-lulu has ploughed down to the former solid rock-bed, and now flows between two very steep banks 200 feet high, whence we can imagine the thickness of the débris.
Between Ugarama and Bukoko we discovered a very fertile tract close to the base of the mountain slope, prodigiously prolific in its melons, pumpkins, sugar-cane and millet; the subsoil is principally gravel and sand mixed with a rich dark loam, but the immense number of large boulders imbedded and half buried in the earth is a striking feature, and point to glacial influence.
Between Bukoko and the mountains three miles away, and stretching along their base southward for five or six miles, is another great tract consisting of just such débris as the side of a mountain would naturally consist in, but being principally of loose matter, it has assumed through a long period of rainfalls a tolerably smooth gradated surface.
If we consider these circumstances as occurring periodically since the upheaval of the great range, and that mighty subsidence which created the wide and deep gulf now embraced by the Albert Edward Nyanza, the Semliki Valley, and Lake Albert, we need not greatly wonder that Ruwenzori now is but the skeleton of what it was originally: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Its head has been shorn of much of its glory of amplitude; its shoulders have been worn and abraded, through its side scores of streams have channeled deep, and the ribs of it now stand, not bare and denuded, but marking indisputably what wearing and battering it has experienced since it was born out of fire. Slowly but surely the mountain is retiring to the place whence it came. A few ages hence the Albert Edward Nyanza will be a great plain, and at a later period Lake Albert will share the same fate. Geographers of that far-off epoch will then rub their eyes should they chance to discover the outlines of the two Nyanzas and intervening valley as they were described in 1889.
