Mount Kenya is the second-highest mountain in Africa, 5,199 metres, a shattered volcanic plug standing alone above the highlands of central Kenya, carrying glaciers on the Equator, and its third summit can be walked to without ropes through a moorland of plants that look invented. The mountain was once a volcano taller than Kilimanjaro, and what remains is its core, twin rock spires called Batian and Nelion that only climbers reach, with Point Lenana, at 4,985 metres, the summit for everyone else. The three peaks carry the names of a Maasai seer, Mbatian, his brother and his son, given by the first climbers to reach the top in 1899. To the Kikuyu the mountain is Kirinyaga, the place of brightness and the home of Ngai, the creator, and the country's own name is a worn-down echo of that word; houses in the highlands are still built with their doors facing the peak.
The trek takes four or five days, and the moorland is the strangest part of it. The Naro Moru and Sirimon trails climb out of forest and bamboo onto tussock grassland where giant groundsels stand like still figures above the grass, wrapping themselves in their own dead leaves to survive nights that drop below freezing on the Equator, and giant lobelias rise in columns, with lichen hanging from wet black rock and hyrax whistling from the boulders. Mackinder's Camp sits in a valley under the peaks, and the summit day starts around three in the morning up scree and rock to Point Lenana for sunrise over the twin spires with the Lewis Glacier, once vast and now a shrinking patch, below. The descent winds down one of the broad U-shaped valleys that the mountain's vanished glaciers scooped from the rock. The ice on Mount Kenya is going within decades. Mount Kenya is a mountain that named a country, and the walk up it passes through a garden that grows nowhere else.