While we were advancing southward along the western flanks of Mazamboni’s, and the Balegga Hills, during the month of May, 1889, the great snowy range was frequently, almost daily, visible--not in its entirety, but by fits and starts, a peak here, a mountain shoulder there, with sometimes only a dim visage of the crowns, and at other times the lower parts only in view. The snow gleamed white out of a dark and cloudy frame, or the flanks, dark as night, loomed like storm-clouds, boding rain and squalls. At rare periods the whole appeared with a brilliant sharp-cut clearness that was very useful to us to map our future route. Yet all this time we scarcely understood its character, and not until we had crossed the Semliki river, and had traversed a great portion of the dense and tall woods, which thrive in the hothouse atmosphere of the Semliki Valley, had we any intelligent comprehension of it. The average European reader will perfectly understand the character of the Semliki Valley and the flanking ranges, if I were to say that its average breadth is about the distance from Dover to Calais, and that in length it would cover the distance between Dover and Plymouth, or from Dunkirk to St. Malo in France. For the English side we have the Balegga hills and rolling plateau from 3,000 to 3,500 feet above the valley. On the opposite side we have heights ranging from 3,000 to 15,500 feet above it. Now, Ruwenzori occupies about ninety miles of the eastern line of mountains, and projects like an enormous bastion of an unconquerable fortress, commanding on the north-east the approaches by the Albert Nyanza and Semliki Valley, and on its southern side the whole basin of the Albert Edward Lake. To a passenger on board one of the Lake Albert steamers proceeding south, this great bastion, on a clear day, would seem to be a range running east and west; to a traveller from the south it would appear as barring all passage north. To one looking at it from the Balegga, or western plateau, it would appear as if the slowly rising table-land of Unyoro was but the glacis of the mountain range. Its western face appears to be so precipitous as to be unscaleable, and its southern side to be a series of traverses and ridges descending one below the other to the Albert Edward Lake. While its eastern face presents a rugged and more broken aspect, lesser bastions project out of the range, and is further defended by isolated outlying forts like Gordon Bennett Mountain, 14,000 to 15,000 feet high, and the Mackinnon Mountain of similar height. That would be a fair figurative description of Ruwenzori. The principal drainage of the snowy range is to the west, down into the Semliki River, and south to the Albert Edward Lake. The Katonga flowing into Lake Victoria, and the Kafur into the Victoria Nile, are both fed from the eastern face of Ruwenzori. The Mississi River, emptying into Lake Albert direct, rises from the northern extremity of the mountains.