Just before Butiti he got his first sight of the snow, and made out that a double peak, which was certainly not Johnston's Duwoni, was clearly the loftiest. Duwoni came into view again in the lower Mobuku valley, and the sight, combined with the known locality of Kiyanja, enabled the expedition to take its bearings. Duwoni was seen through the opening of a large tributary valley, the Bujuku, which entered the Mobuku on the north side between the Portal Peaks. Now it had been clear from the lowlands that the highest snows were to the south of Duwoni, and must consequently lie between that peak and the Mobuku valley. The conclusion was that the Bujuku must lead to the foot of the highest summits, while the Mobuku could not. The discovery was the key of the whole geography of the range. But the Duke did not at once act upon it. He wisely decided to explore Kiyanja first; so, thinning out his caravan and leaving his heavier stores at the last native village, he with his party pushed up the Mobuku torrent. The Mobuku valley falls in stages from the glacier, and at the foot of each stage is a cliff face and a waterfall. The soil everywhere oozes moisture, and where an outcrop of rock or a mat of dead boughs does not give firmer going, it is knee-deep in black mud. The first stage is forest land--great conifers with masses of ferns and tree-ferns below, and above a tangle of creepers and flaming orchids. At the second terrace you come to the fringe of Alpine life. Here is the heath forest, of which let the narrative tell:-- "Trunks and boughs are entirely smothered in a thick layer of mosses which hang like waving beards from every spray, cushion and englobe every knot, curl and swell around each twig, deform every outline and obliterate every feature, till the trees are a mere mass of grotesque contortions, monstrous tumefactions of the discoloured leprous growth. No leaf is to be seen save on the very topmost twigs, yet the forest is dark owing to the dense network of trunks and branches. The soil disappears altogether under innumerable dead trunks, heaped one upon another in intricate piles, covered with mosses, viscous and slippery when exposed to the air; black, naked, and yet neither mildewed nor rotten where they have lain for years and years in deep holes. No forest can be grimmer and stranger than this. The vegetation seems primeval, of some period when forms were uncertain and provisory." But the third terrace is stranger still. There one is out of the forest and in an Alpine meadow between sheer cliffs, with far at the head the gorge of Bujongolo and the tongue of the glacier above it. But what an Alpine meadow!--