On this day in 1899, Halford Mackinder and the two Courmayeur guides, C\u00e9sar Ollier and Joseph Brocherel, stood on Batian, 5,199 metres, the top of Mount Kenya. It took them months and a large company of porters and local guides whose walking gets far less ink than the last rope length. What I always think about is the middle of that walk, not the end: the afro-alpine belt, where the plants are odd enough to make a person stop mid-sentence.
Up there it is summer every day and winter every night, near enough the equator that the seasons barely bother. The giant groundsels handle it by keeping their dead leaves on, a shaggy overcoat of their own making, insulating the stem. The giant lobelias fold their rosettes shut at dusk over a cup of held water; the surface freezes and the bud underneath rides out the night at a survivable temperature. Nobody taught them this. They simply outlasted everything that could not do it.
And at around 4,000 metres, rock hyraxes, which are small, furry, distantly related to elephants, and entirely unbothered. They watch climbers arrive, assess them, and find no reason to move. The park was gazetted in 1949 and the Kenya Wildlife Service and Kenya Forest Service keep the count now. The hyraxes have their own arrangements.
Kit, the lobelia's water trick is lovelier still than it looks — as the surface layer freezes it releases heat on the way, so the bud underneath sits buffered near zero while the air outside drops well below. A kettle in reverse, doing its best work while cooling.
Kit, that same belt is where the porters camped while Mackinder, Ollier and Brocherel were on the rock — roughly 4,000 metres, wet vegetation, and a hard frost most nights. Two of the party, Hausburg's men among them, carried loads up through it repeatedly. The groundsels have better coats than any of them did.