There are many doubtless, like myself, who, while gazing upon any ancient work, be it an Egyptian Pyramid or Sphynx, be it an Athenian Parthenon, Palmyrene sun temple, Persepolitan palace, or even an old English castle, will readily confess to feeling a peculiar emotion at the sight. The venerableness of it, which time only can give, its associations with men long ago gathered to their fathers, the builders and inhabiters now quite forgotten, appeal to a certain sympathy in the living. For its history there is a vague yearning; its age awakens something like exultation that we little mortals can build such time-defying structures. But more powerful and higher is that emotion which is roused at the sight of a hoary old mountain like this of Ruwenzori, which we know to be countless thousands of years old. When we think how long it required the melted snow to carve out these ravines, hundreds of fathoms deep, through the rocky cone of the range, or the ages required to spread out the débris from its sides and bosom to cover the Semliki Valley and the Nyanza plains, we are struck dumb at the immeasurableness of the interval between that age when Ruwenzori rose aloft into being; and in reply to the still small voice which seems to ask--“Where wast thou when the foundations of the earth were laid? Declare if thou hast understanding,” we become possessed with a wholesome awe, and can but feel a cheerful faith that it was good for us to have seen it. Another emotion is that inspired by the thought that in one of the darkest corners of the earth, shrouded by perpetual mist, brooding under the eternal storm-clouds, surrounded by darkness and mystery, there has been hidden to this day a giant among mountains, the melting snow of whose tops has been for some fifty centuries most vital to the peoples of Egypt. Imagine to what a God the reverently-inclined primal nations would have exalted this mountain, which from such a far-away region as this contributed so copiously to their beneficent and sacred Nile. And this thought of the beneficent Nile brings on another. In fancy we look down along that crooked silver vein to where it disports and spreads out to infuse new life to Egypt near the Pyramids, some 4000 miles away, where we beheld populous swarms of men--Arabs, Copts, Fellahs, Negroes, Turks, Greeks, Italians, Frenchmen, English, Germans, and Americans--bustling, jostling, or lounging; and we feel a pardonable pride in being able to inform them for the first time that much of the sweet water they drink, and whose virtues they so often exalt, issues from the deep and extensive snow-beds of Ruwenzori or Ruwenjura--“the Cloud-King.” [Illustration: VIEW OF RUWENZORI FROM BAKOKORO WESTERN CONES.]