THE CONQUEST OF RUVVENZORI.* AT last we have the full
official account of the wonderful expedition to Ruwenzori which the Duke of the Abruzzi led in the summer of 1906. The bare results have long been published, and the world heard something of the details in the Duke's address to the Royal Geographical Society. The pressure of other duties prevented the leader from writing the history of his travels, but the work has been admirably done from the notebooks of the expedition by Cay. Filippi, who was not a member of it. There can be few instances on record of a travel-book of the first importance being compiled by a man who was never within many thousand miles of the places described. The translation from the Italian leaves nothing to be desired, and the mountain photographs of Cay. Vittorio Sella make the book a possession which every mountaineer must covet. Not only is it an enthralling record of exploration and climbing, but there is a mass of valuable scientific material in appendices which is of high value to the geographer. One interesting point seems to us to be cleared up for good. The writer, and Professor Hugues in Appendix A, bring conclusive evidence to prove that Ruwenzori is the tradi- tional Mountains of the Moon, the equatorial snows from which, according to Ptolemy, the Nile springs.
The charm of the book is in the strangeness of the country explored. It is not a story of wild adventures. The Duke of the Abruzzi, one of the most brilliant mountaineers in the world, set out with the intention of clearing up the mysteries once and for all, and he took no avoidable risks of failure. He is a past-master in the organisation of travel, and no con- tingency was unprovided for. Besides a staff of men of science and personal friends, he had four guides from Courmayeur, and a complete outfit of necessaries. The size of the equip- ment may be judged from the fact that from Entebbe onwards
• Ruwenzori an Account of the Expedition of H.R.H. Prince Luigi Amedeo of &soy. Deka of the Abruzzi. By Filippo de Filippi. London : A. Constable and Co. [31s. 6d. net.]
two hundred and fifty porters were required to carry it. The whole scheme worked like clockwork. No difficulty was unforeseen, and the vagaries of the weather were frustrated by patience and forethought. So far as the romance of pioneering goes, Mr. Wollaston with an old ice•axe and a rotten rope wandering in the mist among the rocks of Mount Baker is the more striking figure. The Duke stands rather as the representative of modern science, the last word in efficiency, bearing down by sheer skill the barriers of this last fortress of mystery. His business was not merely to climb, but to explore and map the range, and most patiently and courageously he and his companions bore long days of discomfort, never resting till every peak and valley took its true place on the chart. If ever a riddle was completely solved, it is this old one of the equatorial snows.
The expedition was hampered not so much by lack of information as by the mistaken theories of its predecessors. Several travellers had attempted the range before, and Sir Harry Johnston had named two of the principal summits. It was generally believed that the Mobuku Valley, on the east side, led into the very heart of the range, and that the mountain at its head was the highest peak. This Sir H. Johnston called Kiyanja, and he gave the name of Duwoni to a second peak he saw further to the north. Mr. Douglas Freshfield came to the conclusion that the highest point was a twin-peaked mountain beyond Kiyanja, but when the Duke started the Mobuku Valley was believed to be the proper road to this summit. Accordingly the expedition struggled up that muddy vale, among the matted jungles of senecio, heath, and lobelia, till it reached a place called Bujongolo, near the glacier, where camp was made. On the way up the Duke made an important discovery. On the north side of the Mobuku Valley he saw another great valley opening up between the Portal Peaks. The mountaiu which Sir H. Johnston called Duwoni was seen through the gap beyond the bead of the valley, and from observations made from the plains it had been clear that the peaks of the highest group were to the south of Duwoni. Hence this new valley, the Bujuku, must lead far more directly to the heart of the chain. The Duke was right in his surmise, but he did not at first make use of this dis- covery. He climbed Kiyanja, to which he gave the name of Mount Baker, and verified his suspicion that the highest peaks belonged to a different massif to the north-west. Returning to Bujongolo, he went up a side glen to the south, and reached the pass which Mr. Freshfield had noted. Crossing it, he entered a glen which turned out to be a high affluent of the Butagu, the large valley which runs west to the Semliki. To the north-west of this lay the high peaks, so he ascended to the col at the bead, and found that the way to the summits was clear. The first top to be reached he called Alexandra, and the second, which required some care owing to the heavily corniced snow, he named Margherita. The whole massif be christened Mount Stanley. Then fol- lowed the exploration of the massif south of Mount Baker, which the Royal Geographical Society insisted should be called Luigi di Savoie, and the peaks north of the Bujuku Valley, beginning with Duwoni, which now becomes Mount Spoke, and continuing to Mounts Emin. and Gessi. He descended the Bujuku Valley, and traversed its chief tributaries. The result is that a very complicated geographical problem has been completely solved, and we know the Ruwenzori Range to-day a great deal more minutely than many tracts in the lowlands within easy distance of Entebbe. There is nothing novel about equatorial snow. The Duke has disproved Mr. Freshfield's theory that tropical glaciers are consumed chiefly by evapora- tion. Apparently they resemble in their habits the ordinary Alpine glaciers, and the torrents which flow from them aping in the usual way from the melting of the ice. The difference is that the waters are usually limpid, and this is explained by the fact that the glaciers grind no detritus in their beds owing to their almost complete immobility. Ruwenzori is not a paradise for the climber, as was once supposed. The snow is easy, and the immense cornices are safe, since they are buttressed with a forest of ice stalactites. On the other hand, there may be many difficult rock climbs on the Edward Peak of Mount Stanley, on Mounts Emin and Gessi, and on the isolated rock mountain Cagni. The expedition was too busied with other matters to try any fancy routes.
Does romance vanish with this abundant knowledge P We think not. The Mountains of the Moon still remain the most curious and uncanny of the world's great ranges, and their strangeness grows with knowledge. The deep-cut, water- logged valleys, shrouded nine days out of ten in mist, are filled with a dense vegetation, tropical in richness, and yet a parody of an Alpine flora :-
"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 deathly silence. Here and there, where the face of the cliff was so steep and smooth that no other plant could take root, were great golden patches of moss. In the bottom of the valley the soft, thick, mossy carpet was strewn with violets and forget-me-nots."
It is a scene as uncanny as any lunar landscape which Mr.
Wells ever imagined; the traditional name is surely the best,—the Mountains of the Moon. Cay. Sella's photographs give us wonderful glimpses of these hothouse upland meadows from which rise the rocks and the clean snows. There is still a unique experience for the mountaineer who in some season of clear weather can descend in an hour or two from a snowfield which might belong to the Oberland to a thicket of fantastic tropical growths.
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