The Mountains of the Moon ¹

Abstract

EASTERN equatorial Africa has three mountain groups capped by perpetual snow—Kilimanjaro, Kenya, and Ruwenzori. Though the last is the lowest, and was the most recently discovered, it has aroused the widest popular interest; for its discoverer, Stanley, with characteristic insight, recognised it as “the Mountain of the Moon,” the snows of which, according to the well-known passage in Ptolemy's “Geography,” nourished the sources of the Nile. Ptolemy's general account of the Nile lakes is sufficiently accurate to show that he wrote from positive information. Otherwise, as Signer De Filippi remarks, he must have been gifted with prophetic insight. The statement about the Mountain of the Moon and its snows is, however, probably only an Arab interpolation; that view, so plausibly advanced by, Cooley in 1854, is accepted as probable by Dr. Luigi Hugues in an appendix to this volume. Stanley's identification of Ruwenzori with Ptolemy's Mountain of the Moon has been, of course, called in question, but the alternative theories are as emphatically rejected in this work as in most of its predecessors.