For another, Mr. Hampton was anxious to reach the volcanic region while the craters, of which native report was more definite than regarding the activities of The Prophet, were still in eruption. A pictorial record of them would be something never before obtained and valuable in proportion. Besides, the great mountain region was reputed to be the home not only of elephants, buffalo, bush buck, cheetahs, leopards and lions, but also of the ferocious man-apes or gorillas.
To bag specimens of these animals both by gun and by camera would be the crowning achievement of the expedition.
Therefore, the party did not delay on the way but made each day’s march as long as possible. The more so were they content to do this as, after passing Kabale, a tiny frontier post in the mountains of Uganda, two weeks from Masaka, they entered a desolate volcanic region which had been laid waste by eruptions of lava in 1912 where little game was encountered.
By day, in fact, this region was plunged into a silence so uncanny as to affect the nerves of even the boys. For they were accustomed in their travel through central Africa to hear the jungle alive about them. Here long distances were covered where not even the hum of an insect or the call of a bird was to be heard. It was, in fact, as if they were passing through a dead region where even the ground beneath them was devoid of life.
Neither man nor animals were encountered, and glad, indeed, was every member of the party when at length they came to the edge of the mighty African Rift Valley and beheld below them the vast Mfumbiro Plain with craters breaking up the contour in every direction.
This was the region of the volcanoes, and after glimpsing smoking peaks in the distance all day as they approached, the boys now beheld from the edge of a precipice, below which was spread the great plain, three towering cones with smoke-wreathed summits. Whereas only occasional glimpses had been obtained heretofore, they now could observe the mountains from base to summit.
Never had any of them beheld a more awe-inspiring sight. And standing on the edge of a precipice which fell steeply away a matter of two thousand feet to the plain below, with those three smoking cones against the red sunset sky in the distance, they were speechless.