The Rwenzori spend most of the year invisible. Cloud sits on the range almost every day, and you can walk underneath for a week without once seeing what it covers: Margherita on Mount Stanley, 5,109 metres, the third-highest summit in Africa. The range stands on the border between Uganda and the Congo, and none of it is volcanic: gneiss and granite pushed up in one block along the Albertine Rift. Reaching the ice takes seven to nine days on foot, much of it across bog that takes your leg to the knee. Rain falls in almost every month, so the mud is as much of the trek as the mist. Two glacial tarns lie side by side at Lake Kitandara, walled in by peaks, with the camp right at the water. Mornings are the payment: the cloud has not built yet, and the peaks are out when you wake. Higher, at the snowline camp, the day's cloud sinks into the valleys after dark and the sky opens. The only sounds are meltwater and the ice cracking above you.
Europe spent two thousand years looking for this range on Ptolemy's word. Snow in the middle of Africa, feeding the Nile, was treated as a fable. Henry Morton Stanley, in the Semliki valley in 1888, took the whiteness above him for an oddly shaped cloud. Ptolemy turned out to be right about the water too: streams off this ice run into the Semliki, north into Lake Albert, and out of its far end as the White Nile. What is left up there is going quickly. In 1906 the range carried forty-three glaciers over seven and a half square kilometres. By 2005 that was barely one and a half, and a survey in 2024 found the last big icefield down by nearly a third in four years. The Bakonzo of the foothills give that snow to Kitasamba, a name meaning roughly the one who does not need to climb. Their sons carry the loads up, and many of them go as far as the last camp and no further.