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CHAMBERS’S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
THE MONARCH OF AFRICAN MOUNTAINS.
IN ALL SHADES.
DUST AND HOUSE REFUSE: SHOWING WHAT BECOMES OF IT.
THE HAUNTED JUNGLE.
A NIGHT-RAID ON DONEGAL SMUGGLERS.
SOME FAROE LEGENDS.
THE OLD VIKING.
No. 115.—Vol. III.
Price 1½d.
SATURDAY, MARCH 13, 1886.
THE MONARCH OF AFRICANMOUNTAINS.
To those who associate the name of the greatAfrican continent only with visions of thesteaming mangrove swamps of the west coast,the luxuriant flower-carpets and grasses of thesouth, the trackless sand-wastes of the north, andthe undulating thirsty plains of ‘the Bush,’ whoseidea of Africa, indeed, may be summed up inthree words—sun, savages, and fever—to such,we say, it may be difficult to accept the knowledgethat snow-capped mountains exist in thevery heart of this dry and heat-engirdled land.But yet, there have been for ages, strange talesof a wonderful mountain-mass in the tropicalcentre, whose summit was perpetually coveredwith a mysterious substance which the nativescalled ‘white salt.’ Now, as perpetual snowunder the equator was known only in CentralAmerica—nowhere else do mountains in thetropics reach the snow-line—there did exist forages incredulity as to the existence of this allegedAfrican Mont Blanc or Chimborazo. The legendreferring to it must have been known to the earlyPortuguese travellers at least three centuries ago,for the Portuguese were at Mombasa in the sixteenthcentury, and as Mombasa is within onehundred and eighty miles of the mountain, andis the coast-limit of the trade-route betweenit and the sea, they must have heard the storiesof the native and Arab traders. Others believedthis Kilima-Njaro[1] to be merely the legendary‘Mountains of the Moon.’
The earliest authentic record of ‘discovery’by a European is that of Rebmann, a Germanmissionary, who, on the 11th of May 1848, firstsighted the wonderful snowy dome. Baron Vonder Decken, another German, actually reachedKilima-Njaro in 1861, and stayed on its slopesfor some three months. On a second visit, Vonder Decken ascended to a height of ten thousandfive hundred feet, although he did not reach thesnow. He was followed, in 1871, by an Englishmissionary, the Rev. Charles New, who made twojourneys to Chaga—the native name for theinhabited belt between three and seven thousandfeet above the sea, stretching roun