The Last Secrets: The Final Mysteries of Exploration

by John Buchan

The Peaks and Valleys of Ruwenzori. The Route to Ruwenzori.

The Duke of the Abruzzi was faced at the start with a deplorable absence of information. Even the season when the weather was most favourable was disputed. Mr. Freshfield, following Sir Harry Johnston's advice, tried November, and found a perpetual shower-bath. Warned by this experience, the Duke selected June and July for the attempt, and was fortunate enough to get sufficient clear days to complete his task, though he was repeatedly driven into camp by violent rain. Another matter in doubt was the best means of approach to the highest snows. The obvious route was the Mobuku valley, but by this time it was pretty clear that Kiyanja, the peak at its head, was not the highest, and it was possible that there might be no way out of the valley to the higher western summits. Still, it had been the old way of travellers, and since the alternative was the Butagu valley right on the other side of the range, the Duke chose to follow the steps of his predecessors.

Just before Butiti he got his first sight of the snow, and made out that a double peak, which was certainly not Johnston's Duwoni, was clearly the loftiest. Duwoni came into view again in the lower Mobuku valley, and the sight, combined with the known locality of Kiyanja, enabled the expedition to take its bearings. Duwoni was seen through the opening of a large tributary valley, the Bujuku, which entered the Mobuku on the north side between the Portal Peaks. Now it had been clear from the lowlands that the highest snows were to the south of Duwoni, and must consequently lie between that peak and the Mobuku valley. The conclusion was that the Bujuku must lead to the foot of the highest summits, while the Mobuku could not. The discovery was the key of the whole geography of the range. But the Duke did not at once act upon it. He wisely decided to explore Kiyanja first; so, thinning out his caravan and leaving his heavier stores at the last native village, he with his party pushed up the Mobuku torrent.

The Mobuku valley falls in stages from the glacier, and at the foot of each stage is a cliff face and a waterfall. The soil everywhere oozes moisture, and where an outcrop of rock or a mat of dead boughs does not give firmer going, it is knee-deep in black mud. The first stage is forest land—great conifers with masses of ferns and tree-ferns below, and above a tangle of creepers and flaming orchids. At the second terrace you come to the fringe of Alpine life. Here is the heath forest, of which let the narrative tell:—

"Trunks and boughs are entirely smothered in a thick layer of mosses which hang like waving beards from every spray, cushion and englobe every knot, curl and swell around each twig, deform every outline and obliterate every feature, till the trees are a mere mass of grotesque contortions, monstrous tumefactions of the discoloured leprous growth. No leaf is to be seen save on the very topmost twigs, yet the forest is dark owing to the dense network of trunks and branches. The soil disappears altogether under innumerable dead trunks, heaped one upon another in intricate piles, covered with mosses, viscous and slippery when exposed to the air; black, naked, and yet neither mildewed nor rotten where they have lain for years and years in deep holes. No forest can be grimmer and stranger than this. The vegetation seems primeval, of some period when forms were uncertain and provisory."

But the third terrace is stranger still. There one is out of the forest and in an Alpine meadow between sheer cliffs, with far at the head the gorge of Bujongolo and the tongue of the glacier above it. But what an Alpine meadow!—

"The ground was carpeted with a deep layer of lycopodium and springy moss, and thickly dotted with big clumps of the papery flowers, pink, yellow, and silver white, of the helichrysum or everlasting, above which rose the tall columnar stalks of the lobelia, like funeral torches, beside huge branching groups of the monster senecio. The impression produced was beyond words to describe; the spectacle was too weird, too improbable, too unlike all familiar images, and upon the whole brooded the same grave deathly silence."

It is a commonplace to say that in savage Africa man is surrounded by a fauna still primeval; but in these mountains the flora, too, is of an earlier world—that strange world which is embalmed in our coal seams. Under the veil of mist, among cliffs which lose themselves in the clouds, the traveller walks in an unearthly landscape, with the gaunt candelabra of the senecios, the flambeaus of the lobelias, and the uncanny blooms of the helichryse like decorations at some ghostly feast. The word "helichryse" calls up ridiculous Theocritean associations, as if the sunburnt little "creeping-gold" of Sicily were any kin to these African marvels! Our elders were wise when they named the range the Mountains of the Moon, for such things might well belong to some lunar gorge of Mr. Wells's imagination. Beyond Kiyanja the Duke found a little lake where a fire had raged and the senecios were charred and withered. It was a veritable Valley of Dry Bones.