Thursday, August 06, 2009

The Place of Lions Pt 2

more quotes:
Mount Meru.
Rising to over four thousand five hundred metres, symmetrical and quiet against the vast African sky, it is one of the world's most beautiful mountains.It's lower slopes are covered in dense rain-forest of immense age, a cool fairy land of ancient trees decked out in swathe upon swathe of hanging green mosses.

Here, in this lovely, manless place, baboons and Colobus monkeys pass the day's news back and forth




in harsh, chattering screams; azure and gold lizards dart up and down the damp trees, quick brilliant jewels in the forest gloom; chameleons hunt with their strange rhythmical dance, rocking from leg to leg until moths and insects are mesmerized, then, in an eye-blink,flicking out a whip-like tongue of astonishing length to haul in another luckless meal.

Here two great crashings and splinterings warn of the presence of the world's most destructive beasts,elephants,as they smash their way through the forest ripping whole trees apart i their constant battle to keep their great bulks nourished.


And looking down , over all from unimaginable heights, circle the great birds of Africa, the eagles and buzzards, the harriers and bright bataleurs.

This then is a magical place. Yet it is a neglected an ignored place. A place unknown to most of the world. And the reason it is so lies to the east. Overshadowing Mount Meru and all of Africa is a mountain everyone knows. A colossus so high, so vast, so unlikely that wise men in Europe laughed in disbelief at its discovery. Kilimanjaro, the wise men said could not exist. Snow in the tropics was impossible. These foolish missionaries in Africa were seeing cloud, mistaking it for snow and should get new glasses...."

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