Free Area 51: The Sphinx-4 by Robert Doherty Page A

shuttle had been.

    THE MOUNTAINS OF THE MOON,
    RUWENZORI, UGANDA

    Professor Mualama took another deep drink from the canteen looped over his shoulder and looked up at the wall of heavy clouds that blocked the sky to the west as he spoke. He was a continent away from South America, but once more deep inside an uninhabited wilderness.
    "The Greek historian Herodotus, visiting Egypt in 547 B.C., was told that the source of the Nile was a bottomless lake set among tall, whitecapped mountains astride the equator. He thought the story was outrageous, but—and this is a valuable lesson for you. Nephew—he wrote it down anyway."
    The young man whom Mualama had just addressed was a bit worse for wear. Peter Lago's khaki shirt was streaked with salt stains. His arms were covered with scratches and his muscles ached from the eight-hour march since leaving the last sign of civilization in Kasese, Uganda. They'd been climbing up a one-track trail since getting off the plane on the unfinished dirt strip in the town, and as far as Lago could tell, they were heading into the clouds. His uncle had set an unrelenting pace, in a rush since having Lago pick him up at the airport in Dar es Salaam the previous evening, hiring a bush pilot to fly them illegally into Uganda, and setting off on the trail.
    Lago—a former archaeology student at Dar es Salaam—had worked with his uncle on, digs before. East Africa was where many of the oldest fossils attributable

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    to genus Homo had been found. The two had spent several summers working at the established digs in the Olduvai Gorge of Tanzania, where a fossil of Homo habilis had been found that had been dated back two million years. Homo habilis was the true beginning of the lineage of current man, and so few fossils had been found that any discovery was significant.
    Lago considered his uncle a very strange man with eclectic interests. Both ancient man and modern history mesmerized his uncle—he was a scientist who believed in knowing one's facts, yet he also collected every piece of legend and mythology he could find.
    Lago was still waiting for an explanation why they were here, but he was used to his uncle's long silences, because he knew he would eventually get more information than he ever wanted once the older man began speaking. It appeared that time had come as Mualama began talking again, filling up the minutes of the short break that he had allowed every two hours during the march.

    "In A.D. 50, Marinus of Tyre, a geographer, recorded a story he heard from a Greek merchant who claimed to have traveled inland from the east coast of Africa for twenty-five days and reached a land of mountains and snow where the source of the Nile came out of two lakes.
    "The Greek mathematician and geographer Ptolemy was the first geographer to use longitude and latitude lines to identify locations on the face of the planet. He also thought the idea of snowcapped mountains lying on the hot equator most fascinating. He called these mountains Luna Montes, the Mountains of the Moon, a name many still use for where we are."
    Mualama stretched his back, the bones cracking as they settled in place. In his backpack lay the package he had recovered under the stone in the Devil's Throat. It

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    had pointed him to the next clue, back home to Africa, and he had wasted no time getting here.
    "Unlike Kilimanjaro and Ngorongoro," he continued, "these mountains—also called the Ruwenzori, a corruption of the local word for rainy mountains—were not formed by volcanic action. We are basically on the edge of an enormous massif, about one hundred and twenty kilometers long and fifty kilometers wide.
    "We are in Uganda, and the border with Zaire runs along the center of this massif, where the peaks are." He pointed ahead at the clouds. "There are four major summits—Mounts Speke, Stanley, Baker, and Luigi di Savoia. All named after white men, of course. The locals have their own name for them, which the