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A place where the flowers grow twenty-three feet tall, and all the animals are bigger than their counterparts in other regions. Or so says Willard Price in Elephant Adventure, one of the rather fun, and at times quite barking mad "Adventure" series, about Hal and Roger Hunt. It's supposedly a real region of Africa, though, first mentioned by a chap named Diogenes (not that one). Can't find a date for this particular Diogenes, but Ptolemy mentions him, and he lived from 90AD - 168AD. Which doesn't really help. And yes, there is a reason for this somewhat jumbled history and geography lesson. I've been reading a book called The Meadows Of Gold, by Mas'Udi, and he mentions the Mountains Of The Moon, which made me think of dear old Willard Price; so I started researching. And crikey, what a lot of argument.
They exist! They don't exist! Yes they do! No they don't! Diogenes was making it up! No he wasn't! Current thinking says that what he called the Mountains Of The Moon are the Ruwenzori (or Rwenzori) Range on the border between Uganda and Congo. Very pretty. Fabulous forests and great diversity of species. Thing is, though, Mas'Udi and the rest specifically state that the Mountains are at 7° south of the equator. The Ruwenzori Range... aren't. Excuse my maths. The highest peak in the range is Mount Stanley which is around 23' north of the equator. I'm quite fascinated by this, because the ancient writers claim the Mountains to be the source of the Nile. Everybody knows that the European explorer types decided that that was Lake Victoria, but recent theory suggests that that's not an entirely accurate claim, as Lake Victoria itself has tributaries. And I rather like the idea of some ancient explorer having worked out the answer to the question a good couple of thousand years before the Europeans did - if for no other reason than that the European explorers were such a smug lot. Mas'Udi says that if you pass through the Mountains Of The Moon, you come to the land of Sofala (now Mozambique), and also to the island of Qanbulu (now Njazidja, one of the Comoro Islands). And you'd have a fair old job to hit them coming out of Uganda. If you look at 7° south of the equator, though, you're in Tanzania; and if you wander on out of Tanzania, you hit Mozambique. And Njazidja is just over the way, too. Not that this especially makes Mas'Udi look like some grand geographer. He puts the Nile at 2245 miles long, for one thing, and it's roughly twice that. I'm rather fond of this whole Mountains Of The Moon thing, though. Ancient explorers, wandering the globe, noting down the things that they saw, and chatting to the locals - and then hundreds and hundreds of years later, European explorers arguing over where all those things were. I mean, it's pretty hard to mislay a bloody great mountain range. They're big things, mountains. Especially Mount Kilimanjaro, which is in the same approximate region that Mas'Udi speaks of (if you're generous - it's at 3° south, but then nobody seems to know how far the Mountains Of The Moon spread). You'd find it pretty tough to lose Mount Kilimanjaro, even on a bad day. It's 4,600 metres tall. That's well on its way to being five kilometres straight up.
Anyway, I'm rambling again. What was the point of this entry? Possibly something about giant flowers, I don't remember as far back as the start of all this nonsense. Source of the Nile. Flowers twenty-three feet tall. Blimey it's late. Take a wander around Tanzania, and there's that many lakes and rivers, it's a hell of a job trying to work out what's connected to what. Everything seems to be a tributary of everything else. I'd rather like it if Diogenes was right, though. Why shouldn't the true source of the Nile be some little river further south than anybody's noticed yet?! Though it's not necessarily going to turn out to be in a place where there are flowers twenty-three feet tall, and where giant elephants roam. Although it would be nice if it was, obviously. That'd give Willard Price the last laugh too.
*Re-reads entry* It's painfully obvious that I don't have a clue what I'm rattling on about, isn't it. Thousands of years ago, though, people wandered the globe and mapped out regions, and they didn't have satellites or fancy maps, and half the time, when they were there, they didn't entirely know where there was. But they went there anyway. And they didn't try to convert anybody, and they didn't say that their way was best, and they didn't patronise the locals - thought admittedly they did sometimes try to conquer them a bit. It all seems so much more friendly than all those years later, when a new bunch of explorers came, and claimed that they were discovering it all for the first time, regardless of the fact that there were already people living there. And frankly I'd rather credit the first bunch with discovering the source of the Nile, and the location of the fancy mountains, and even the discovery of twenty-three foot high flowers if it makes them happy. And it would make you happy, I think, if you found a flower that was twenty-three feet high. Well - unless it was a Triffid. You wouldn't be very happy then. Unless you're a bit odd.
Oh dear, it really is late. And I never did manage to make any sense. Never mind. Suffice to say, if Diogenes wants the source of the Nile to be in a region of mountains that nobody else entirely believes in, then why the hell not. He's not hurting anybody. And that goes for Mas'Udi, too. And the latest claim is that the true source of the Nile is the Ruvyironza River in Burundi, which is around about 3° south of the equator. Ha. Same as Mount Kilimanjaro. Yes, okay, it's pushing it a bit. But I say credit Diogenes and screw the modern types. But then geography never was my favourite subject.
Jeepers, it really is late now. Four twenty in the morning is far too late to be pretending to make sense. I'm going to bed before I spout even more nonsense. Goodnight.
They exist! They don't exist! Yes they do! No they don't! Diogenes was making it up! No he wasn't! Current thinking says that what he called the Mountains Of The Moon are the Ruwenzori (or Rwenzori) Range on the border between Uganda and Congo. Very pretty. Fabulous forests and great diversity of species. Thing is, though, Mas'Udi and the rest specifically state that the Mountains are at 7° south of the equator. The Ruwenzori Range... aren't. Excuse my maths. The highest peak in the range is Mount Stanley which is around 23' north of the equator. I'm quite fascinated by this, because the ancient writers claim the Mountains to be the source of the Nile. Everybody knows that the European explorer types decided that that was Lake Victoria, but recent theory suggests that that's not an entirely accurate claim, as Lake Victoria itself has tributaries. And I rather like the idea of some ancient explorer having worked out the answer to the question a good couple of thousand years before the Europeans did - if for no other reason than that the European explorers were such a smug lot. Mas'Udi says that if you pass through the Mountains Of The Moon, you come to the land of Sofala (now Mozambique), and also to the island of Qanbulu (now Njazidja, one of the Comoro Islands). And you'd have a fair old job to hit them coming out of Uganda. If you look at 7° south of the equator, though, you're in Tanzania; and if you wander on out of Tanzania, you hit Mozambique. And Njazidja is just over the way, too. Not that this especially makes Mas'Udi look like some grand geographer. He puts the Nile at 2245 miles long, for one thing, and it's roughly twice that. I'm rather fond of this whole Mountains Of The Moon thing, though. Ancient explorers, wandering the globe, noting down the things that they saw, and chatting to the locals - and then hundreds and hundreds of years later, European explorers arguing over where all those things were. I mean, it's pretty hard to mislay a bloody great mountain range. They're big things, mountains. Especially Mount Kilimanjaro, which is in the same approximate region that Mas'Udi speaks of (if you're generous - it's at 3° south, but then nobody seems to know how far the Mountains Of The Moon spread). You'd find it pretty tough to lose Mount Kilimanjaro, even on a bad day. It's 4,600 metres tall. That's well on its way to being five kilometres straight up.
Anyway, I'm rambling again. What was the point of this entry? Possibly something about giant flowers, I don't remember as far back as the start of all this nonsense. Source of the Nile. Flowers twenty-three feet tall. Blimey it's late. Take a wander around Tanzania, and there's that many lakes and rivers, it's a hell of a job trying to work out what's connected to what. Everything seems to be a tributary of everything else. I'd rather like it if Diogenes was right, though. Why shouldn't the true source of the Nile be some little river further south than anybody's noticed yet?! Though it's not necessarily going to turn out to be in a place where there are flowers twenty-three feet tall, and where giant elephants roam. Although it would be nice if it was, obviously. That'd give Willard Price the last laugh too.
*Re-reads entry* It's painfully obvious that I don't have a clue what I'm rattling on about, isn't it. Thousands of years ago, though, people wandered the globe and mapped out regions, and they didn't have satellites or fancy maps, and half the time, when they were there, they didn't entirely know where there was. But they went there anyway. And they didn't try to convert anybody, and they didn't say that their way was best, and they didn't patronise the locals - thought admittedly they did sometimes try to conquer them a bit. It all seems so much more friendly than all those years later, when a new bunch of explorers came, and claimed that they were discovering it all for the first time, regardless of the fact that there were already people living there. And frankly I'd rather credit the first bunch with discovering the source of the Nile, and the location of the fancy mountains, and even the discovery of twenty-three foot high flowers if it makes them happy. And it would make you happy, I think, if you found a flower that was twenty-three feet high. Well - unless it was a Triffid. You wouldn't be very happy then. Unless you're a bit odd.
Oh dear, it really is late. And I never did manage to make any sense. Never mind. Suffice to say, if Diogenes wants the source of the Nile to be in a region of mountains that nobody else entirely believes in, then why the hell not. He's not hurting anybody. And that goes for Mas'Udi, too. And the latest claim is that the true source of the Nile is the Ruvyironza River in Burundi, which is around about 3° south of the equator. Ha. Same as Mount Kilimanjaro. Yes, okay, it's pushing it a bit. But I say credit Diogenes and screw the modern types. But then geography never was my favourite subject.
Jeepers, it really is late now. Four twenty in the morning is far too late to be pretending to make sense. I'm going to bed before I spout even more nonsense. Goodnight.
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