Early on the eighth of May they moved forward again and Emin found much consolation in turning his attention to scientific matters. He discovered new and unknown species of plants and insects which he investigated and added to his collections and soon made the greatest discovery of all. For the first time he had an opportunity to make a close observation of a great mountain phenomenon, which had been seen from a distance by Casati and by Stanley on the first expedition, but which was now thoroughly investigated for the first time. This was the snow mountain Ruwenzori (Cloud King), as the natives called it, according to Stanley, separating the Albert Nyanza from the Albert Edward Lake. Its mighty glaciers and copious rainstorms fed the Semliki, a great tributary of the Nile, thus solving the question of the sources of this tributary which had so long been obscure. The spectacle of this snow mountain below the equator in a world of heat and sunshine is a magnificent one. Deep, dark valleys lie along its base. Beautiful trees, shrubs, and ferns bedeck its slopes, with timber below and the flowers of the Alpine world, while its lofty summit and glaciers belong to the region of eternal snow. In company with Lieutenant Stairs and forty men Emin undertook the ascent of the mountain, but did not get far because of deep intersecting valleys and the lack of food and proper clothing for the higher region. At the south end of Victoria Lake they turned southward and there took an easterly direction. On the seventeenth of October the French missionaries, Fathers Girault and Schynse, joined them. On the tenth of November the bearers shouted: “To-day we shall come to Mpapua,” and about noon from an eminence they beheld a station with a German flag waving. Lieutenant Rochus Schmidt welcomed them to German territory and accompanied them with his soldiers to the coast. They soon exchanged the sight of the parched and thorny wilderness for a land fragrant with lilies and clad in spring greenery. The Makata plain, with its green grass and its numerous groups of villages, was ample compensation for the four months of wretchedness and hardship they had endured. [Illustration: _THE SNOW MOUNTAIN_] Shortly after this messengers from Major Wissmann, governor of German East Africa at Bagamojo, met them with ample supplies. As the travellers were pursuing their way by moonlight on the third of December they heard the report of a cannon. It was the evening gun at Zanzibar. The Zanzibarites gave a joyous shout, for it told them that their long journey across the continent was at an end. The Egyptians and their attendants also joined in the shout, for they now knew that in the next twenty-four hours they would see the ocean over which they would go safely and comfortably to Egypt, their future home. Chapter XV Emin’s Misfortune