TO THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON.*
To ask a continent its age seems a geological impertinence. Yet that is one among many other questions to which Africa, the long enduring, must now find an answer. It is only a few years since the author of the volume just published on the Mountains of the Moon discovered that Lake Tanganyika was not as other lakes are, but apparently a relic of some pre- historic sea, peopled by creatures of the Jurassic period, and bearing in its waters many other evidences that if not actually a prehistoric pool, it lies in a basin into which part of an antique ocean drained, carrying its fauna with it. That the continent should bear on its back such a relic of antiquity would seem evidence of the permanence and stability of the present state of Africa. Until quite recently it was the accepted view of geographers that Africa, unlike America, was an example of such permanence; that its earth and rocks had for untold generations passed the period of their tumultuous youth ; that it had no volcanoes, no earthquakes, no uprisings of mountains or sinkings of seas; that it was inert, without terrestrial changes, and, geo- logically speaking, without a history. Later inquiries showed that quite recent volcanoes existed there ; then one was discovered still hot and smoking in the Mfumbiro Mountains, and later evidence of monstrous movements of the earth has accumulated on all sides. Among the strangest proofs are • To the Mountains ofE the Moon : being an Account of the Modern Aspect of Central Africa. By J. E. S. Moore, F.B.G.B. London: Hurst and B [2ls.] the great " rift valleys " which run north and south. These are the results of what are known as " faults " on a gigantic seale. The whole continent lies like a hog's back, along the chine of which these enormous cracks run for thousands of miles. In the southern cracks lie Lakes Nyassa, Tanganyika, and RifIrwa. Further north are Lake Kivu, the Albert Edward and Albert Nyanzas, and connected with their valleys the rift in which Lakes Rudolf and Beringo lie. The same line of rift went on northward, and became first the chum of the Red Sea, and then ran up the Gulf of Akabah to the Dead Sea, which, lying as it does in another rift valley, that of the Jordan, is like another African lake in miniature, while the deep cleft of the Jordan, with its sunken hollow, high temperature, and birds which reproduce the types of the tropics, as Mr. H. M. Upcher and Canon Tristram showed many years ago, is of the same character as the rift valleys of Central Africa.
The volume which Mr. J. E. Moore has just published has two main lines of interest. It describes the chain of lakes which lie like puddles up the central rift valleys, in proper relation to their geological time and formation, and it pieces together the great central ranges of mountains east of these lakes, until it is difficult not to agree with him that there exists there what is practically an immense central range, often snow-capped and glacier-worn, almost as long as the Rocky Mountains in their United States section. He has also proved that instead of there being some single "Mount Ruwenzori " north of Albert Edward Lake, there is a splendid snowy range, "composed of as many different elemental peaks as the Alps seen from the Italian plains." In a length of seventy-five miles visible from one spot were four immense distinct groups of snowy peaks. To talk of "ascending Ruwenzori" is as absurd as to talk of ascending the Alps. The series of lakes, with the mountain walls and volcanoes, which either border or connect them, lies roughly as follows, going from south due north. Tanganyika Lake is connected by a swampy river lying in the bottom of a valley bordered by mountains rising to 5,000 ft. with Kivu Lake. Above Kivu Lake lies Albert Edward Lake, but cut off from it by an immense mass of mountains, two of which are volcanoes, and one of a height of 11,350 ft. This is Kirunga-cha-yongo. It is still active, as is the other great peak. Mr. Moore and his companion, Mr. Fergusson, ascended the mountain and looked•into the crater. On the opposite side of this mass of mountains lies Albert Edward Lake, and beyond that again, parallel with the streams connecting it with Albert Nyanza (these names are not a little confusing), are the Mountains of the Moon. The forests at their bases, the snow-peaks, the glaciers, the astonishing views looking up and looking down, form the subject of the most interesting chapters of the book. We can only touch on a few of the main discoveries. The vegetation is extraordinary. Above the tropical forest in a cold zone lies a forest of heather. The heather grows in trees to a height of 80 ft., and these trees, fallen and decayed, cover the old watercourses like rotten platforms. Both the men and the goats which the explorers ingeniously selected to drive up the mountain with them, and so to ensure a food supply, con- stantly fell through this natural flooring. Various points were reached on a line as long and as high as that between Mont Blanc and St. Gothard. Mr. Moore ascended above the line of snow and ice to a connecting ridge, where calculations showed an altitude of 14,900 ft., and immense snow-fields and green glaciers shone around. His generalisations as to the formation of typical African landscape, and especially the natural parks (p. 320), are of great interest, and the whole book is a valuable document'of exploration and discovery.
Mr. Moore is now an experienced African traveller. Re has seen the continent from the inside and the outside. Re knows its people, and our people. He is familiar with the unchanging mind of the African, and abreast with the latest phases and fits of opinion here on the land inul its people. He knows also, by sad experience, the Immense area and deadly incidence of what Professor Henry
Drummond rightly called the scourge of Africa,— fever. His conclusions are pessimist, and though his pages show here and there traces of: overstrain of nerve, there is no reason to minimise the importance of his general con- elusions. He thinks that the black man (of Central Africa) has many good points which people in general admire. He has none of the cringing humility of the Indian coolie, and is often honest and courageous. He has also made the best to a great extent of his surroundings. But he much doubts whether we shall improve him, except by protecting him from the Arab slaver, and he has still more doubts as to whether any European will improve his own position com- mercially or otherwise by yielding to the charm of mystery and settling anywhere in Central Africa. Those uplands near Nyassa which have been set down as salubrious homes for settlers, and the nurseries of young colonies, "have in an obtrusive manner the baleful attributes of a cemetery." He then sums up his whole pilgrimage or survey from the " residential" point of view. A long quotation may be excused, for it is of practical value, though he does not mention whether the northern plains are free from fever :— " It may be remembered that in our recent journey we entered Africa through the mouth of the Zambesi River in a profound morass ; that we journeyed for hundreds of miles through what a schoolboy would call unmitigated and unsavoury splodge ' ; that the people hereabout died. and had died, and that their successors die again ; that a Malarial Commission was sitting on the subject of their deaths, and that instead of the Malarial Commission settling the fever bugs,' the same redoubtable parasites nearly settled the Malarial Commission. Later on we came to a hilly country covered with stunted trees. We reached, in fact, the Shire Highlands, where, instead of the country being composed of universal' splodge,' it becomes diversified with rocks, which stick up out of the splodge.' From this region we went on holding our noses to 'Lake Nyassa, where almost every one was dead whom I had met on my former expedition On the way to Tanganyika. we found ourselves in a succession of arid, leafless wildernesses, covered with European graves, and without anything in the way either of comforts or necessaries. Then again we descended into the valley of Lake Tanganyika itself. On the shores of the lake the people have died, are dying, and will die ; they go on, or rather, they go off, there faster than they do in the Nyassa region. After leaving Tanganyika we ascended once more into the curious Kivu land, high and cool, and charming as a work of art, but of the health of which no tale has yet been told, except the authenticated death of a German sergeant who had lived up there, 5,000 ft. in the air, for more than a year before he departed, seized with black-water fever, the worst type of African fever there is. Beyond Kivu there are the long, fiery plains south of the Albert Edward Nyanza, and north of this again, rising out of profound splodge,' the towering ranges of the Mountains of the Moon. Still north of these are the vast, unexplored, unmapped swamp wastes of the Upper Nile, but which, wherever they have been crossed, are described as dancing with heat, and literally humming with millions of mosquitoes Nowhere along this vast interior, along any of the thousands of miles of route over which I have travelled, have I ever come across places which would compare favourably with the very worst districts of New Zealand or the Far West of America."
This is, be it noted, an estimate of Central Africa only, of the crack and the ruins of the crack which runs up the spine of the continent. Mr. Moore admits that South Africa has the finest climate in the world, and says nothing against the high plateaux over which the Uganda railway runs, and from which English ladies have recently returned, after accompanying their relatives onhunting-trips, in the beat of health and spirits. Somaliland, too, is all that could be desired in regard to the conditions of health. But Mr. Moore deals with the centre, the lakes, the adjacent mountains, the river outlets, and casts an eye over the Upper Nile swamps. Below, to the west, are the endless marshes and feverish forests of the Upper Congo tributaries. Consequently, when he pronounces Central Africa to be unfit for habitation, he passes a verdict on the whole country from the Zambesi north to Gondokoro, and from the central line to the western ocean. It is perhaps as well to know and remember this. It may narrow the area which a certain class of Englishmen think we are bound to police, settle, and " develop."
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