In England the missionaries’ information was greatly discredited, because they had not been able to map out their journeys by observations for latitude and longitude, and could only fix the position of the mountains, of which they alleged the existence, by dead reckoning. As a matter of fact, they placed them with wonderful accuracy, considering the rough methods employed, and subsequent discoveries have corroborated their statements. Krapf only saw Mount Kenia from a distance of over forty miles, and Rebmann probably approached no nearer than fifteen miles to the snows of Kilima-njaro. Both could only asseverate that they had _seen_ snow, and both were accused of being deceived by their vivid imaginations. Their most relentless critic was a redoubtable person, for long years a terror to real explorers, Mr. Desborough Cooley, a kind of geographical ogre, who used to sit in his study in England, shaping and planning out the map of Africa (basing his arrangements of rivers, lakes, and mountains on ridiculous and fantastic linguistic coincidences and resemblances of his own imagination), and who rushed out and tore in pieces all unheeding explorers in the field who brought to light actual facts which upset his elaborate geographical schemes. Mr. Cooley proved in the most exhaustive and conclusive manner, that Messrs. Krapf and Rebmann could _not_ have seen mountains capped with perpetual snow in Equatorial Africa, and, _ergo_, they did not exist. However, Nature and Truth are relentless. They will not stifle or modify their accomplished facts to please any one. You would have thought that after the beautiful and logical manner in which Mr. Cooley had set forth that snow-clad mountains could _not_ exist near the Equator (I suppose he forgot those of America), that Nature would have felt ashamed of producing anything unnatural and would have backed up Mr. Cooley’s statements by whipping Kilima-njaro and Kenia off the land of Africa before any adventurous explorer could conclusively prove their existence. But no; after an interval[4] of about ten years, in 1861, Baron von der Decken, a Hanoverian, went to Kilima-njaro and stayed there from the end of July to the beginning of September, and was able entirely to corroborate the statements of the much-maligned Rebmann.