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Title: Mountains of the Moon by Patrick Millington Synge ISBN: 0-947752-40-4 Publisher: Hippocrene Books Pub. Date: 01 July, 1986 Format: Paperback List Price(USD): $11.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: expeditions of hope...
Comment: This book is a naturalist's dream. I read this along with another African expedition log, "In Stanley's Footsteps: Across Africa from West to East."

56 years after Synge, the married authors journeyed 3,000 miles, travelling by train, riverboat and truck from Matadi on the Atlantic coast of Zaire, across Central Africa to Zanzibar at the edge of the Indian Ocean, recreating the route covered by Henry Morton Stanley (of "Dr. Livingston, I presume?" fame). Their account of Stanley's trek, and their own, is exhausting, treacherous, and even hilarious in chapters like "Tenative Steps," "Deviation and Disaster," and "Mountains of the Moon."

Though less lyrical than Synge, it was enlightening to get detailed descriptions of the Rwenzori Range set 50 years apart!

Rating: 5
Summary: Worth tracking down this out-of-print gem
Comment: In 1934, Patrick Synge travelled on an expedition sponsored by the British Museum of Natural History to the Ruwenzori range in East Africa, purported to be the "mountains of the moon" spoken of by Herodotus. Synge, a botanist, was immediately enchanted by the place. His book is, in large part, an enthusiastic and good-natured account of the things that most impressed him. Being a botanist, his most vivid writing concerns plants, but I must say that seldom have I read more captivating descriptions of local scenery, flora, and fauna. Synge was but 24 when he went on the expedition, and his descriptions exude youthful high spirits and delight in being afoot in a new country.

From the beginning, Synge seems to pick up on some of the native's feeling for the mountain as an animate, living presence. At first he seems mildly patronizing about this attitude of superstitious nature-worship on the part of the porters, but later he seems to fall under the spell of the mountain himself:

"Ruwenzori seems the only mountain which we visited which has a definite personality; it was the only mountain which really had something to say to the traveller: sometimes the word was incredibly hostile, like a terrifying ogre to a small child; sometimes it was a friendly welcome, dignified and courteous, as some beautiful but elderly lady welcoming her grandchildren. Although the silence was immense, we never felt the mountain was passive. It was awake and watched our every movement... It is a feeling partly induced by the bizarreness of vegetation, by snaky and luxuriant growth combined with mist, damp, and cold; but it is also a feeling of personality, aliveness, resident in the mountain, something part of it and not entirely dependent on a superficial covering of vegetation. It is a feeling not only of mystery and weirdness, but also of allurement and stimulation, which spurs on the traveller and will always summon him back again."

No doubt you've gleaned from the above passage the romantic, lyrical quality of Synge's writing, which is far from the dry field notes of your ordinary botanist. This poetic quality comes to the fore when he describes his beloved plants. He imbues them with almost human characteristics, and gushes boyishly about each new day's finds.

There is a quality of "sympathetic irony", too, in the way that Synge recounts the mishaps of the expedition, buoyed by his native optimism. The one note of melancholy that crept into my reading of this book was my reflection that, at the time that Synge visited this region, it was a land of unforetold promise; now, alas, it is a land of collapsed hopes.