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 
