Lost Worlds Read Free Page B

learning to tread softly in these secret places and to safeguard a world we barely comprehend. We are learning to accept its gifts gratefully, to take only what we need (and continually reexamine the need for these “needs”) and to hold its bounty in trust for the future. It is our world—our only home. We are the earth—and the earth is us.
    And—last confession—I love it.

 

1. 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. A simple Bantu expression meaning “hill of rain” or “rainmaker.” He recorded his sighting as:
    A sky-piercing whiteness…which assumed the proportion and appearance of a vast mountain covered with snow.
     
    Those two irascible wanderers Richard Burton and John Speke were convinced the Nile was born here. Burton referred to the massif as the “Lunatic Mountains” because of the old legends of men being driven to madness trying to seek them out in a region covered by clouds for most of every year. But the two men never proved their hypotheses to the satisfaction of the walrus-mustached, sideburned doyens of exploratory knowledge sipping their ports and brandies in the mahogany-and portrait-walled confines of Britain’s Royal Geographical Society.
    The wonderfully foolish, courageous, desperate (and very erotic) expeditions of these two men merely added confusion and cartographical conflict to the neat-minded “Empire” protagonists in their sagging leather wing chairs.
    “Nonsense!” they said.
    “Wrong measurements,” they said.
    “Let’s have another drink and toast the Queen,” they said.
    And so two more “life must be more than this” exponents were dumped into the ash cans of dubious notoriety. Lives of soaring adventure ending in squalid squabbles, mutual backstabbing—and ignominious deaths.
     
     
    The “Mountains of the Moon”! What an enticing prospect. A red rag to this wandering bull. Hidden in their almost perpetual cloud cover, they definitely exist. We know that from later, better-organized expeditions. But even Ptolemy guessed the presence of the “Lunae Montes” somewhere in the center of the continent. Aristotle referred to “a silver mountain” in the heart of Africa, and Aeschylus wrote of “the Gods’ great garden [the Nile Delta] fed by distant snows.”
    The region is still a mysterious lost world today. People have vanished here, dying in blizzards, being swallowed up by moss bogs, or tumbling off the edge of ice-sheened precipices. French mountaineer Bernard Pierre described it “a place not of this planet.”
    But it is on this planet and I had to see these peaks. Touch them. Trample over their glaciers and ice fields. Explore the strange foothills where familiar flowers and plants back home—heather, lobelia, groundsels, and ferns—grow into tree-sized specimens, where three-foot-long earthworms ease through mossy bogs, and where one of the oddest creatures on earth, the rock or tree hyrax (a rabbitlike member of the elephant