The present writer is unable to understand why that able geographer, Mr. E. G. Ravenstein, has doubted the identification of Ruwenzori with Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon. It must be obvious, when all facts are considered, that Ruwenzori was the principal germ of this idea. The Greek traders at Rhapta (Pangani) no doubt had some idea of the existence of Kilimanjaro, but it is doubtful whether either the single dome of Kilimanjaro or the gleaming pinnacle of Kenia would impress the imagination so strongly as the whole brilliant range of Ruwenzori’s four or five snow-peaks and thirty miles of glaciation. On such occasions, as when this range is visible from a distance, and broadside on, the dark blue forested slopes merge into the morning mists of the lowlands, leaving the splendid phantasmagoria of cream-coloured snow and gray rock floating in the sky like an exaggerated lunar landscape. Ptolemy places this range, as he does his lakes, too far to the south, and associates it more with the modern country of Unyamwezi than with the region between the two lakes Albert and Victoria. But no doubt then, as in Speke’s day, Ruwenzori and Lake Albert were reached by Greek adventurers, by Sabæan Arabs, or by natives who served as intermediaries, by way of the established trade route through Unyamwezi. This word, which means “the Land of the Moon,” appears to be rather old for a Bantu place name: Unyamwezi indeed seems in the history of Bantu migrations to have played an important part, and to have been one of those many sub-centres from which great dispersals of the Bantu races took place. Indeed the Zulus (who were probably the dreaded Mazimba or Bazimba spoken of by the Portuguese) seem to have halted in their cannibal days in Unyamwezi before they descended on South Africa in the sixteenth century. Ruwenzori is not, after all, such a very long journey to the northwest of Unyamwezi, and it is very possible that the returning travellers, having stated that they reached the Nile sources and these wonderful snow-mountains through the Land of the Moon thus caused this lunar name to be applied by Ptolemy to the Ruwenzori range. Though not an explorer, Ptolemy stands (for his age) in the highest rank of Nile geographers; but he had to wait something like seventeen hundred and forty years before Sir Henry Stanley, by his discovery of the Semliki, the Ruwenzori snow-range, and the last problems of the Nile sources, did justice to that remarkable foreshadowing of the main features of the Nile system due to the genius of the Alexandrian geographer. CHAPTER III ABYSSINIANS AND JEWS