Page:The empire and the century.djvu/854

 By EWART S. GROGAN

chill breath of Karissimbi's morning snows fanned my cheek; I turned in my steaming bed of bamboo Ct, shook the moisture from my clothes, pulled on my boots, and climbed to a rocky spur on the old volcano's flank.

Six thousand feet below the last of Africa's great secrets lay sleeping beneath the mist-counterpane of night

Never shall I forget that dawn.

Alone, perched like some silly fly far up on the weather-scarred face of one of those vast volcanoes by the mighty travail of whose birth all the stupendous form of the African continent has been distorted, climatic conditions readjusted, and the comings and goings of men from the dim pre-Pharaoh days to the million generations of men as yet unborn moulded anew—alone I sat and saw the sun slide from behind the Ankoli hills and gradually bring into fierce relief the ten million features of the last great stretch of Africa's unknown.

South, the mists writhed in the seventy-mile caldron of the Kivu Lake, drew into long wisps, and were sucked heavenwards by the fast-warming air. The black cliffs of Kwijwi Island started from the placid bosom of the lake. Headlands galore, purple and forbidding, scored the shell-tinted waste of water. And the Titanic walls of this, the greatest of all rifts, towered 809