In 1875 Stanley encamped for several days upon the eastern slopes, but he did not realize the greatness of the heights above him. He thought they were something like Elgon, and he christened them Mount Edwin Arnold (a name happily not continued); but he had no thought of snow or glacier, and he disbelieved the native stories of white stuff on the top. In 1876 Gordon's emissary, Gessi, recorded a strange apparition, "like snow mountains in the sky," which his men saw, but he seems to have considered it a hallucination. Stranger still, Emin Pasha lived for ten years on Lake Albert and never once saw the range--a fact which may be partly explained by his bad eyesight. Ruwenzori keeps its secret well. The mists from the Semliki valley shroud its base, and only on the clearest days, and for a very little time, can the traveller get such a prospect as Mr. Grogan got on his famous walk from the Cape to Cairo--"a purple mass, peak piled upon peak, black-streaked with forest, scored with ravine, and ever mounting till her castellated crags shoot their gleaming tops far into the violet heavens." The true discoverer was Stanley, who, in 1888, suddenly had a vision of the range from the south-west shore of Lake Albert. Every one remembers the famous passage:-- "While looking to the south-east and meditating upon the events of the last month, my eyes were directed by a boy to a mountain said to be covered with salt, and I saw a peculiar-shaped cloud of a most beautiful silver colour, which assumed the proportions and appearance of a vast mountain covered with snow. Following its form downward, I became struck with the deep blue-black colour of its base, and wondered if it portended another tornado; then as the sight descended to the gap between the eastern and western plateaus I became for the first time conscious that what I gazed upon was not the image or semblance of a vast mountain, but the solid substance of a real one, with its summit covered with snow.... It now dawned upon me that this must be Ruwenzori, which was said to be covered with a white metal or substance believed to be rock, as reported by Kavali's two slaves." Stanley had neither the time nor the equipment for mountain expeditions, though to the end of his life Ruwenzori remained for him a centre of romance. It was his "dear wish," as he told the Royal Geographical Society shortly before his death, that some lover of Alpine climbing would take the range in hand and explore it from top to bottom. In 1889 one of his companions, Lieutenant Stairs, made an attempt from the north-west, and reached a height of nearly 11,000 feet. Two years later Dr. Stuhlmann, a member of Emin's expedition, made a bold journey up the Butagu valley on the west, discovered the wonderful mountain vegetation, and nearly reached the snow level. In 1895 came Mr. Scott Elliot, who was primarily a botanist, but who, in spite of bad malaria, managed to struggle as far as 13,000 feet.