INTRODUCTORY. 
9 
asseverate that tliej had seen snow, and both were 
accused of being deceived by their vivid imaginations. 
Their most relentless critic was a redoubtable person, 
for long years a terror to real explorers, Mr. 
Desborougli Cooley, a kind of geographical ogre, who 
used to sit in his study in England, shaping and 
planning out the map of Africa (basing his arrange¬ 
ments of rivers, lakes, and mountains on ridiculous 
and fantastic linguistic coincidences and resemblances 
of his own imagination), and who rushed out and tore 
in pieces all unheeding explorers in the field who 
brought to light actual facts which upset his elaborate 
geographical schemes. Mr. Cooley proved in the most 
exhaustive and conclusive manner, that Messrs. Krapf 
and Rebmann could not have seen mountains capped 
with perpetual snow in Equatorial Africa, and, ergo , the]/ 
did not exist. 
However, Nature and Truth are relentless. They 
will not stifle or modify their accomplished facts to 
please any one. Yon would have thought that after 
the beautiful and logical manner in which Mr. Cooley 
had set forth that snow-clad mountains could not 
exist near the Equator (I suppose he forgot those of 
America), that Nature would have felt ashamed of 
producing anything unnatural and would have backed 
up Mr. Cooley’s statements by whipping Kilima-njaro 
and Kenia off the land of Africa before any adventu¬ 
rous explorer could conclusively prove their existence. 
But no; after an interval 4 of about ten years, in 1861, 
Baron von der Hecken, a Hanoverian, went to Kilima- 
4 Rebmann bad made a second journey to Kilima-njaro soon after 
bis first, intending to proceed due east to the Unknown Lake (Vic¬ 
toria Kyanza), but the chief of Macame plundered him and compelled 
him to return unsuccessfully to the coast. 
