Hearing good accounts of the more genial nature of the Zanzibar Arabs and of their Maskat ruler, Krapf journeyed down the East Coast of Africa and visited the Sayyid of Zanzibar (Majid); he obtained permission from this Arab viceroy[47] to settle at Mombasa and establish a Christian mission there. Krapf was soon joined by John Rebman (another Würtemberger). Both were well-educated men, who had been trained at Tübingen, at Basle, and in Rebman’s case at an English missionary college. They acquired a knowledge of Arabic, and soon added to it an intimate acquaintance with several African tongues. Their intercourse with the Arabs and the Negroes at Mombasa and its vicinity soon opened their ears to remarkable stories of the unknown interior. Already the Arabs were pushing farther and farther inland from these ports on the Zanzibar coast, and some of them had reached Lake Tanganyika, while they had also heard rumours of the Victoria Nyanza. The natives further told the missionaries of the wonderfully high mountains distant from ten to thirty days’ march from the coast, the tops of which were covered with “white stuff.” By 1850, through the agency of the Church Missionary Society, Rebman and Krapf were able to report from their own observation the existence of snow-mountains nearly under the equator, Rebman having discovered Kilimanjaro in 1848, while in the following year Krapf not only confirmed this discovery, but pushed his way far enough inland to catch a glimpse of Mount Kenya, the distance of which from the coast he underestimated. The missionaries also sent to Europe about the same time stories of a great inland sea. They had gathered up the reports of Lake Nyasa, Tanganyika, and the Victoria Nyanza, and had imagined these separate sheets of water to be only parts of a huge, slug-shaped lake as big as the Caspian Sea. They also reported the separate existence of Lake Baringo. These stories they illustrated by a map (Erhardt and Rebman) published in 1855. Their stories of snow-mountains in equatorial Africa only drew down on them for the most part the ridicule of English geographers, among whom was a wearisome person, Mr. Desborough Cooley, who published fine-spun theories based on a fantastic interpretation of African etymology; but their stories were believed in France, and they were awarded a medal by the Paris Geographical Society. They also impressed an American poet, Bayard Taylor, who in 1855 wrote some stirring lines on Kilimanjaro:-- “Remote, inaccessible, silent, and lone-- Who from the heart of the tropical fervours Liftest to heaven thine alien snows.”