The Valley to the West of Mount Baker.
(By permission of Messrs. Arch. Constable & Co., Ltd.)
The riddle of equatorial snow has been solved, and there is nothing very startling in the answer. The upper part of the mountains has no marvels to show equal to the giant groundsels and lobelias and the forests of heath on the lower slopes. The glaciers are all small, without tributaries, as in Norway; and there are no real basins, but merely "a sort of glacier caps from which ice digitations flow down at divers points." All the same, the glacier formation is more respectable than Mr. Freshfield thought, for he saw only the small ice-stream at the head of the Mobuku, and was not aware of the much greater one from Mount Stanley which descends to the upper Bujuku valley. The limit of perpetual snow is about 14,600 feet. Mr. Freshfield was so struck by the small size of the Mobuku torrent where it issues from the glacier, and by its clearness, that he thought it must come from some underground spring rather than from a real melting of the ice. He maintained that tropical glaciers were consumed mainly by evaporation and only in a small degree by melting. The Duke has, however, made it clear that the glaciers of Ruwenzori are subject to the same conditions as those of the Alps, and that their streams are true glacier torrents. The limpidity of the water he ascribes to their almost complete immobility, which means that there is no grinding of the detritus in their beds.
On the whole, the range offers no great scope for the energies of the mountaineer. The ice and snow work is easy, and even the huge cornices, such as are found on Margherita, are fairly safe for the climber, owing to the way in which they are propped by a forest of ice stalactites caused by the rapid melting of the snow. On the other hand, there is abundance of rock climbing of every degree of difficulty, for the mountains below the snow-line fall very sheer to the valleys. Luigi di Savoia, Emin, and Gessi are virtually rock peaks; an isolated summit, Mount Cagni, is wholly rock; and there are fine rock faces on Mount Baker and the Edward and Savoia Peaks of Mount Stanley. I doubt, however, if Ruwenzori will ever be a centre for the rock gymnast. The weather would damp the ardour of the most earnest habitué of Chamonix or San Martino. A few hours of sunshine once a week are not enough in which to plan out routes up cliffs whose scale far exceeds the measure of the Alps. The Grepon or the Dru would have long remained virgin if their crags had been for ever slimy with moisture and draped in mist, and the climber had to descend to no comfortable Montanvert, but to a clammy tent among swamps and mildews.
And yet those peaks remain almost the strangest of the world's wonders, and their ascent will always be one of the finest of human adventures. They are Mountains of the Moon rather than of this common earth. The first discoverers brought back tales which were scarcely credible—ice-peaks of Himalayan magnitude, soaring out of flame-coloured tropic jungles. For long mountaineers were consumed with curiosity as to what mysteries lay behind that veil of mist. For all they knew, equatorial snow might be difficult beyond the skill of man, and Ruwenzori the eternal and unapproachable goal of the adventurer's ambition. The truth is prosaic beside these imaginings. Any man who can afford the time and the money, who selects the right time of year, and is sound in wind and limb, can stand on the dome of Margherita.
But the experience will still be unique, for these mountains have no fellows on the globe. There is a certain kinship between the tale of the first ascent of Mount McKinley in Alaska,* and that of the Duke of the Abruzzi. That gaunt icy peak is as unlike the ordinary snow mountain as Ruwenzori. The climb began from the glacier at a height of 1,000 feet, and 19,000 feet of snow and ice had to be surmounted. The Alaskan giant and the Mountains of the Moon stand at the opposite poles of climate, but both are alike in being outside the brotherhood of mountains. They are extravagances of Nature, moulded without regard to human needs. For mountains, when all has been said, belong to the habitable world. They are barriers between the settlements of man, and from their isolation the climber looks to the vineyards and cornlands and cities of the plains. An ice-peak near the Pole and a range veiled in the steaming mists of the Line are solitudes more retired and sanctuaries more inviolate. The common mountain-top lifts a man above the tumult of the lowlands, but these seem to carry him beyond the tumult of the world.
* See [Chapter VI.]
V
THE SOUTH POLE
THE SOUTH POLE