Page:The National geographic magazine, volume 1.djvu/150

 Standing on the citadel at Cairo, and looking south, you see a sandstone ridge which gradually grows in altitude and width of base as it runs far away to the south, even to the Cape of Good Hope at the other end of Africa. Successive ranges of mountains follow the coast, sometimes near, at others two or three hundred miles inland; the land, in the latter case, ascending from the coast. The only breaks in this long chain are where the Zambezi and Limpopo force their way to the Indian Ocean.

In Abyssinia, on the Red Sea, there is a range of snowy mountains 14,700 feet in height. A few hundred miles to the southeast, and near Lake Victoria Nyanza, almost under the equator, is another snow-capped mountain, Kilima Njaro, 18,700 feet high,―the highest mountain in Africa,―and the mountains of Massai-Land, a continuation of the Abyssinian Mountains. Another range, apparently an offshoot of the long range from the Red Sea, forms a wall 100 miles long, and 10,000 feet high, on the east of Lake Nyassa, separating the waters of that lake from the Indian Ocean. This range continues to the Zambezi. South of this river the mountains rise 8,000 to 10,000 feet in height. In Cape Colony are several ranges of mountains. The highest peak is Compas Berg, 8,500 feet. In the eastern center of Africa, in the equatorial region, is an elevated plateau in which is the lake region, then there is a sudden rise, and a gradual descent towards the Atlantic. There are few continuous ranges of mountains on the western coast; but at Kamerun there is a cluster of mountains reaching an elevation of 13,100 feet; and south of Morocco some of the peaks of the Atlas Mountains reach an elevation of 12,000 to 13,000 feet, but they have little if any influence on the rainfall or temperature of the country. It will be seen from this statement that eastern Africa has high mountain-ranges rising into an elevated plateau; that the land in Equatorial Africa gradually descends toward the west and north-west until within one or two hundred miles of the Atlantic Ocean, when the descent is rapid to the low and unhealthy coast-lands. Through equatorial Africa runs the Kongo, the land north of the Kongo gradually rising to an elevation of about 2,000 feet, and then descending to 1,200 feet at Lake Chad. South of the Kongo the land rises to an elevation of 3,000 feet, and retains this elevation far south into the Portuguese territory.