MOUNT KILIMANJARO
Mount Kilimanjaro is a beautiful great shining mountain of 5,895m always bearing a glittering mantle of snow. The highest mountain in Africa is also a national park which extends from mountain rain forest to scrub and alpine moorland and finally snow and ice fields at the summit. Before the discovery of the mountain for the western world by the missionary Johannes Rebmann in 1848, ancient Swahili and Arab legends used to tell about a great inland mountain, in the summit of which lived a terrible god who punished those who dared to approach his dwelling by paralysing their hands and feet. In this very poetic way, the inhabitants of the tropical shores described a phenomenon that was alien to them: freezing.
Upon the partition of East Africa into two spheres of influence, German and British, England had two mountains vs. none for Germany, so Queen Victoria gave the Kilimanjaro as a birthday present to her nephew-grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II…
