Rachel Cade [antikvár]

The Ruwenzori is a mountain range rising to 16,798 feet near the equator in Central Africa. Its highest peaks are covered by glaciers and snows, but few people have seen them, for they are wrapped almost constantly in clouds. For centuries the Ruwenzori, which means the Rain Maker in Swahili, has stirred the imaginations of Africans. As long ago as the second century Ptolemy, the Alexandrian, placed the mountains quite accurately on his map of the continent. He called them the Mountains of the Moon, and by that name they are best known to this day. There is, or there was until recently, a legend that God dwells among the summits of the Mountains of the Moon. For Africans generally believe in the existence of God, a Supreme Being, the creator and dispenser of all things. But they do not worship Him until goaded to it by white peoples, preferring to leave Him alone and not draw His attention to themselves for fear of angering Him. Once, many years ago, the legend recounts, a few white men came to climb the Mountains of the Moon. But they failed, and in their failure one of the young men of a village near the foot of the mountains lost his life. Disgrunded, the white men went away west across the plain and into the forests and never again were seen in that place. Then the medicine men cast a strong curse. They told the people it was the most powerful thahu ever cast. This is the thahu: If any white ever tried to climb to the highest peaks from this place in the western shadows of the Mountains of the Moon, his body would be racked by pain and his soul doomed to eternal suffering. At the time our story begins, no one had climbed to the highest peaks from this place. The name of the place is Dibela. When the American, Rachel Cade, went there, she had not heard the legend.