The Rwenzori hide in cloud so completely that when Henry Morton Stanley finally saw them on 24 May 1888, he took the whiteness above the Semliki valley for "a peculiar-shaped cloud", then realised he was looking at snow on the equator. This is no volcano like Kilimanjaro or Mount Kenya but a block of gneiss and granite shoved up along the Albertine Rift three million years ago, carrying Africa's third-highest summit: 5,109-metre Margherita Peak on Mount Stanley. Its ice is almost certainly the snow Ptolemy placed at the source of the Nile — the "Mountains of the Moon" Europe hunted for two thousand years. A World Heritage Site since 1994, it carries some of the last equatorial glaciers on Earth, and they are nearly spent: 43 named glaciers covered 7.5 square kilometres in 1906, barely 1.5 remained by 2005, and a drone survey in 2024 found the last large icefield had lost almost a third of its surface in four years.
Reaching that ice takes seven to nine days on foot, through five worlds stacked up one mountainside: dripping montane forest, then bamboo, then tree heathers hung with old-man's-beard lichen, then afro-alpine moorland where groundsels and lobelias grow into giants, and finally bare rock and snow. Rain falls here in almost every month; the bogs of the Bujuku valley swallow a leg to the knee, and the mud is as much a part of the memory as the mist and the tarns. Bakonzo guides and porters carry the loads, and many stop where the ice begins, because the snow belongs to their god. The mountain is open and permits are simple to arrange, but it is changing underfoot: as the glacier pulls back, guides now link more bare rock into the roped final pitch to Margherita, and the summit their fathers crossed on ice is turning into a scramble.