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Strike eastward far enough and you would sight the snow-capped crest of Kilimanjaro, King of African mountains, sitting snow-crowned above the vast territory to which he has given his name, and which stretches from Lake Eyasi to the Pare Mountains. The hunters of Kilimanjaro, which once was the home of elephants, have thinned the herds and driven them to wander.
It is now well known that the Baron subsequently ascended the Kilimanjaro to 14,000 feet, and ascertained its highest peak to be at least 20,000 feet above the sea. Mr. Thornton made the map of the first journey, at Shupanga, from materials collected when with the Baron; and when that work was accomplished, followed us.
Although tropical in its climate, high ground, and especially the slopes of Kilimanjaro, provided inhabitable land for white men, and its wealth in forests, gold and other minerals, pastoral and agricultural facilities was considerable. There were four excellent ports, and from two of them, Tanga and the capital, Dar-es-Salaam, railways ran far into the interior.
We dined just at sunset under a small tree at the very top of the peak. Long bars of light shot through the western clouds; the plain turned from solid earth to a mysterious sea of shifting twilights; the buttes stood up, wrapped in veils of soft desert colours; Kilimanjaro hung suspended like a rose-coloured bubble above the abyss beyond the world.
The present condition of the country between Mount Kilimanjaro and the Victoria Nyanza shows quite as great a mixture of species.
Two days later, from the southern slopes of Kilimanjaro, he heard the boom of cannon far away to the east. The afternoon had been dull and cloudy and now as he was passing through a narrow gorge a few great drops of rain began to splatter upon his naked shoulders.
Kilimanjaro, 18,881 feet high, and Kenia, in the equatorial regions of Central Africa, are about 150 miles from the Victoria Nyanza, and a still greater distance from the ocean; and Mount Demavend, in Persia, which rises to an elevation of 18,464 feet near the southern shore of the Caspian Sea, a volcanic mountain of the first magnitude, is now extinct or dormant.
Experience had made us shy of enforced landings from the sea; and rejecting the idea of seizing as bases Tanga or Dar-es-Salaam, which would have given him shorter lines of communication with the Cape, Smuts adopted the more circuitous route by the railway from Mombasa, with the design of forcing the gap below Kilimanjaro and driving the Germans southwards, while British and Belgian subsidiary forces impinged upon the enemy's flank from the Lakes, the Congo State, and Nyasa in the west.
After accounting for Schneider as satisfactorily as lay within his power he circled Kilimanjaro and hunted in the foothills to the north of that mightiest of mountains as he had discovered that in the neighborhood of the armies there was no hunting at all.
Some of the Arabs believe that meteoric stones are thrown at Satan for his wickedness. They believe that cannon were taken up Kilimanjaro by the first Arabs who came into the country, and there they lie. They deny that Van der Decken did more than go round a portion of the base of the mountain; he could not get on the mass of the mountain: all his donkeys and some of his men died by the cold.
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