a long discussion in Somali between Askar and Abdi, which
finally was briefly rendered into English. Askar would show us the way.

We then sent for the sultan of the Ketosh tribe and interviewed him. He
was singularly reticent about the subject, and both he and the other
natives called in used all their crude intelligence to discourage any
attempt to go up into those districts that were so full of strange,
forbidding influences. They said there were no trails, and when we said
we would go anyway, they said there was a trail, but that it was so
tangled with undergrowth and vines that one had to creep through it,
like an animal. We still said we would go, and told the sultan to get us
guides, for which we would pay well.

All this happened while we were in the Ketosh village that lies on the
slope of the mountain just beneath the great rock wall, a thousand feet
high, whose upper rim is honeycombed with the ancient caves of the
aborigines. For days we had stopped there, endeavoring to get food and
guides, and for days the sultan and his people had placed every obstacle
in the way of our ascending higher the mysterious and comparatively
unknown mountain. The great rock escarpment shut off the view of the
peaks beyond, but we felt that if once we could scale the first
precipitous slope we would find traveling much easier on the gentle
slope of the mountain.

At last, after persuasion, threats, money, and pleading had in turn been
tried, the sultan brought his son and said that his son would guide us.

The son was the craftiest and crookedest looking native I had seen in
Africa. After one look at him, you were filled with such distrust and
suspicion that you would hardly believe him if he said he thought it was
going to rain, or that crops were looking up.

With this man as a guide, and with four more who were tempted by the
bright red blankets we gave, our caravan started on one of the strangest
and perhaps most foolhardy trips that presumably sane people ever made.
In the first place, probably fewer than half a dozen white men had ever
ascended Mount Elgon. There were no adequate maps of the region, and the
one we had was woefully inaccurate. It was made as if from telegraphic
description, and the only thing in which it proved trustworthy was that
there was a mountain there and that it was about fourteen thousand two
hundred feet high, and that the line separating British East Africa from
Uganda ran through the crater