ZAIRE’S RUWENZORI To the Mountains of the Moon “It was like traveling back to the earliest beginning of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish…. The stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect.” —Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness Just think about it. Soaring ice and glacier-wrapped peaks rising almost seventeen thousand feet out of the scrub, forests, swamps, and grasslands of lowland Zaire and Uganda. The third highest mountains in Africa. Vast, majestic, sky-scratching, cloud-smothered pinnacles in the middle of millions of square miles of unexplored, unmapped wilderness. Henry Morton Stanley, the man who sought out the elusive Dr. Livingstone in 1871 and became the first European explorer to see this mystical mountain massif, called it just that—Ruwenzori.
