300 THE LAND OF THE LION 



still await the explorers. And yet one more, most beautiful 

 of all I think, that view across the blue five miles of Jackson 

 Lake, to the three great Tetons rising sheer from the farther 

 shore. Yes, I have these and many another lovely mountain 

 panorama in our country and in Europe before my eyes as 

 I write. But here surely are beauty, stateliness, charm, 

 that surpass them all. Limitless green lawns of grass, 

 worn smooth by nature's cropping, lie at her feet. Mountain 

 woodlands are drawn up to her for square miles by the 

 hundreds. Impenetrable forest belts her as a girdle; and 

 then from the mighty girth of her base (150 miles) she lifts 

 herself, up above the woodland, above the bamboo thicket, 

 above the sparse mountain pasturages, up into dark rocky 

 gorge and crevass, up still into the solitudes of ice and snow, 

 till at last with one lonely majestic column she crowns her- 

 self, 18,200 feet above the sea. 



I have ridden far from camp for this last look. How 

 near she seems in the hazy sunlit vapour of the morning! 

 But though the glass brings even her secret places near, the 

 distance to that group of summits, to that great ice fall pour- 

 ing into the profound hollow between them, is probably quite 

 fifteen miles. Now the last lingering mists around these 

 summits are melting away, and virgin snow and tumultuous 

 ice fall, all lie open to the blue, blue sky. I can see the very 

 base of her topmost crown, and can mark the sheer perpen- 

 dicular line (as seen from this side) in which, with never a 

 waver, it mounts upward for the last two thousand feet. 

 But Kenia's mystery and charm gathers not only round her 

 matchless peak. Her mighty bases have their secrets, too, 

 unsolved, unpenetrated. The forests on those great slopes 

 are probably the densest in all Africa. The trees are of 

 immense size, the bamboo grows to sixty feet. The sides of 

 the mountain are broken up, carved and ploughed, more 

 deeply even than the sides of Elgon, by the volcanic forces 

 that tore their way to the light. 



