The Rwenzori Mountains are a range of gneiss and granite on the equator, on the border of Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, carrying the third-highest peak in Africa, Margherita on Mount Stanley at 5,109 metres, with glaciers above bogs of giant lobelias, and they are climbed on treks of a week or more from Kasese through five worlds of vegetation into cloud that hides the peaks most of the year. The Mountains of the Moon, as Ptolemy called them, were mocked for centuries as a fable of African snow feeding the Nile, and they were right, since the range's rivers run into Lake Albert and the Nile; the trail leaves steaming montane forest, passes through bamboo and then tree heathers bearded with lichen, and breaks out onto afro-alpine moorland, where the plants are the wrong size, groundsels and lobelias that stay knee-high elsewhere grown into trees because the equatorial sun and the nightly frost favour the giants, standing in bogs that the walkers sink into to the knee. The Bakonzo of the foothills give the summit snow to Kitasamba, the one who does not need to climb, and their guides and porters carry the treks.
Lake Kitandara is the camp of the high route, two glacial tarns side by side in a valley walled by peaks with shores ringed by giant lobelias, and at the high camp on the snowline the daily cloud usually sinks into the valleys after dark and the sky over Mount Stanley opens hard and clear. The summit day is a roped pitch over the Stanley glacier, Africa's last equatorial ice, shrinking fast, to the rock of Margherita, done in the two dry windows of the year, from December to February and June to August, the only dependable chance to see the peaks. The lower forest holds chimpanzees and the Rwenzori turaco, and the Bakonzo villages on the slopes grow coffee. The Rwenzori are the mountains of the moon that turned out to be real, and the snow on them is going.