The Mountains of the moon, or the Ruwenzori mountain range, forms an eighty-mile long backbone on the frontier of Zaire and Uganda in East Africa, and extends northwards to within 70 miles of Lake Albert. Springing from the bottom of a rift valley, it reaches a height of 16,794 feet with Margaret Peak.
The name “Mountains of the Moon” is a very ancient one, for Herodotus, Aristotle and Ptolemy all had vague ideas that the source of the great River Nile lay in some far distant mountains, the fabled “Mountains of the Moon”, the silver peaks whose glistening snows fed the lake sources of the Nile.
However, it was not until 1888 that the Ruwenzori Range was first discovered for the Western world by the great American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, and climbed for the first time in 1906 by the Duke of Abruzzi.
Several earlier explorers had camped within the area, but had been defeated by heavy rainfall.
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