300 IN AFRICA 



The next day a Martian sitting upon his planet 

 with a powerful glass might have seen the amazing 

 sight of three horses, one mule, two bullocks, a goat, 

 and a sheep, preceded and followed by over a hun- 

 dred human beings, painfully creep over the rim 

 of the crater and breathlessly pause before the great 

 panorama of Africa that lay stretched out for hun- 

 dreds of miles on all sides. It was as though an 

 army had ascended Mont Blanc, and thus Hannibal 

 crossing the Alps was repeated on a small scale. 



Leaving our horses on the rim of the crater, a 

 few of us climbed the highest peak, fourteen thou- 

 sand three hundred and seventy-five feet high, as 

 registered by my aneroid barometer, and stood 

 where very few had stood before. Even the official 

 height of the mountain, as given on the maps, was 

 found to be inaccurate, and illustrated how vaguely 

 the geographers knew the mountain. 



That night we camped in the crater, twelve thou- 

 sand feet up, and washed in a boiling sulphur spring 

 that sprang from the rocks on the Uganda side. 

 Perhaps this was the boiling fountain the supersti- 

 tious natives feared, for it was the only one we saw. 

 And perhaps the great gorge through which the 

 river Turkwel, or Suam, flowed on its long journey 

 north was the door that Askar had told us about. It 

 was the only door we saw, but Askar said the door 

 he meant was away off somewhere else, and he was 

 so vague and confused in his bearings that we felt 

 his information was unreliable. 



The crater of Mount Elgon has long since lost 



