Sometimes these ascending fields of snow, by the velocity of their movements, grinding and dragging power, weight and compactness of their bodies, cause extensive landslips, when tracts of wood and bush are borne sheer down, with all the soil which nourished them, to the bed rock, from which it will be evident that enormous masses of material, consisting of boulders, rock fragments, pebbles, gravel, sand trees, plants, and soil, are precipitated from the countless mountain slopes and ravine sides into the valley of the Semliki. In front of the Rami-lulu River from the mountain there has been at one time some such disastrous pouring of the ruins of a mountain side, so sudden that the river was blocked, the tract there covered about six square miles. Since that time the Rami-lulu has ploughed down to the former solid rock-bed, and now flows between two very steep banks 200 feet high, whence we can imagine the thickness of the débris. Between Ugarama and Bukoko we discovered a very fertile tract close to the base of the mountain slope, prodigiously prolific in its melons, pumpkins, sugar-cane and millet; the subsoil is principally gravel and sand mixed with a rich dark loam, but the immense number of large boulders imbedded and half buried in the earth is a striking feature, and point to glacial influence. Between Bukoko and the mountains three miles away, and stretching along their base southward for five or six miles, is another great tract consisting of just such débris as the side of a mountain would naturally consist in, but being principally of loose matter, it has assumed through a long period of rainfalls a tolerably smooth gradated surface. If we consider these circumstances as occurring periodically since the upheaval of the great range, and that mighty subsidence which created the wide and deep gulf now embraced by the Albert Edward Nyanza, the Semliki Valley, and Lake Albert, we need not greatly wonder that Ruwenzori now is but the skeleton of what it was originally: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” Its head has been shorn of much of its glory of amplitude; its shoulders have been worn and abraded, through its side scores of streams have channeled deep, and the ribs of it now stand, not bare and denuded, but marking indisputably what wearing and battering it has experienced since it was born out of fire. Slowly but surely the mountain is retiring to the place whence it came. A few ages hence the Albert Edward Nyanza will be a great plain, and at a later period Lake Albert will share the same fate. Geographers of that far-off epoch will then rub their eyes should they chance to discover the outlines of the two Nyanzas and intervening valley as they were described in 1889. [Illustration: RUWENZORI, FROM KARIMI.]