Dedication
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Henry
Osmaston with a Tibetan refugee in the Ladakh region of India.
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By Jeremy Bernstein
August 12, 2006
I am dedicating this article to a man I never met.
Henry Osmaston died on June 27 of this year in Finsthwaite in the Lake
District of England. He was 84. For the past several months we had been
carrying out a lively e-mail correspondence - it became a three-party
correspondence that I will share with you - on matters concerning the
Mountains of the Moon.
No one knew more about these mountains than Osmaston.
In 1972 he and David Pasteur published what was then the definitive guide
to the range. Osmaston was curious about everything so the guide is full
of both the history, the flora and fauna of the range. All of us who
visited it always had this guide with us.
Osmaston was born in 1922 in the Himalayan Hill
Station of Dehra Dun where his father Arthur was an officer in the Indian
Forest Service. He wrote a definitive book on the birds of Garwhal. Young
Henry was sent back to England to Eton and then Oxford. He served in the
war and came back to Oxford as a major. He took a degree in forestry and
after his marriage, went to Uganda in the forestry service where he served
for 14 years. It was during this time that he came to know and love the
Mountains of the Moon, having first participated in an expedition in 1952.
While preparing for the expedition Osmaston did the first recorded skiing
on the Stanley Plateau and in 1958 created the Mountains of the Moon ski
championships. Whether this still goes on in view of the receding glaciers
I do not know. After Uganda became independent, Osmaston returned to
England in 1963 and took a doctorate in geography from Oxford. He then
taught at Bristol University until his retirement in 1988.
When I was writing the version of the following
article that I am now publishing, I managed to find Osmaston's e-mail
address and we began corresponding. He made some very helpful suggestions
and I, in turn, was able to help him. He was finishing a new edition of
his guide. (This time, alone, as Pasteur had died.) As it turned out I had
taken the most recent photos of the Congo side of the range, now too
dangerous to travel in. He asked to use some of my pictures which I was
very glad to agree to. I also put him in touch with the classicist Glen
Bowersock at the Institute for Advanced Study. I think you will enjoy
their exchange.
Professor Glen W. Bowerstock, Princeton.
Dear Professor,
Please excuse my bothering you, but I have been
corresponding with Jeremy Bernstein, who mentioned your name. I am
revising a mountaineering guidebook which I published in 1972 to the
Ruwenzori Mts. (now Rwenzori and commonly called the Mountains of the
Moon) on the Uganda/Congo border. This includes a historical summary,
including Claudius Ptolemy's contribution.
There is a voluminous literature of varying
reliability about the supposed source of the Nile, which I have tried to
filter and condense so that my pre-Victorian entries now read as follows;
if you would kindly spare the time to read this and tell me of any
egregious errors I should be most grateful:
• 500 B.C. Aeschylus wrote of 'Egypt nurtured by the
snows' (3).
• 450 B.C. Herodotus said that the Nile rose from a
spring fed by the waters of a bottomless lake, situated between two
sharp-pointed peaks, Crophi and Mophi; Humphreys likens this to the Lac de
la Lune between Emin and Gessi (123, 132).
• 350 B.C. Aristotle wrote of 'the Silver Mountain' as
the source of the Nile (6).
• 150 A.D. Claudius Ptolemy, an Alexandrine of Greek
origin (c. AD 87 -150), who made extensive use of the work of Marinus of
Tyre (A.D. 120), wrote of 'the Mountain of the Moon, whose snows feed the
lakes, sources of the Nile.' Marinus referred to information coming from
the voyage of a certain man named Diogenes. This man apparently claimed to
have been blown south by a storm from Aromata (cape Guardafui) for 25
days. He then supposedly came "to the promontory of Rhapta (Pangani),
which is a bit south of a lake from which the Nile flows." Since Diogenes
(who is otherwise unknown) also claimed to have sailed back to Egypt by
the Nile, then impassably blocked by the sudd as well as cataracts and
waterfalls, no reliance can be put on this story. (208, 47, 67, 301, 314).
• 1154 The Arab geographer Edrisi (Abu' Abdulla
Mohamed) described the positions of the great lakes and the Jebel el Qamar
(the Mountains of the Moon), though this word can just meant 'white' (60).
There has been much dispute among geographers as to
whether these early references applied to the Rwenzori, the Virunga Mts.,
the country of the Banyamwezi (people of the moon), Mt. Kenya and
Kilimanjaro, or Ethiopia; there is evidence for the last, but the problem
is probably insoluble. Now the Rwenzori have, by superior publicity,
firmly established their claim to be at least the modern Mountains of the
Moon, though a popular book (W. Harrison, 1982) and film Mountains of the
Moon covers the Burton & Speke expedition, not the Rwenzori. (47, 67, 244,
314)
Almost all the literature quotes the words "Lunae
montes." I had already picked up a note that this should be in the
singular (see above) so I am particularly interested in JB's comment that
you confirmed that the original Greek text is in the singular. I live far
from academic libraries, my daughter has my Liddell & Scott and my
memories of Homer and Greek Testament are now 70 years rusty.
What exactly did Ptolemy write? And how reliably do we
know? Something including the words oros and selene?
Yours sincerely,
Henry Osmaston
Dear Mr. Osmaston,
Here are some observations on the material you have
forwarded to me. (By the way, my surname, unlike yours, has no letter T in
it.)
Since the dates you provide are, presumably, meant to
be approximate, I will omit ca. before what I give you. For Aeschylus, 500
is too early: put 470. The life dates you give for Ptolemy are not
defensible, although your approximate date for his work (150) is generally
accepted. You should omit a date for Marinus, since all we know is that he
preceded Ptolemy, probably by a not very great interval. Edrisi should be
spelled, more correctly, Idrisi. Jebel would be a singular, and if he gave
a plural (I don't have a text to hand) you should write Jibal.
As for what Ptolemy wrote, we have the original Greek
text. Your supposition about oros and selene are absolutely correct. The
Greek is to tHs selHnHs oros. (I use H for the letter eta.)
With kind regards,
Glen Bowersock.
Dear Professor,
Very many thanks for your prompt and clear replies
which I have embodied in my text. I now feel much more confident of it and
have even persuaded my machine (which had its own ideas about diacritics)
to try to write Ptolemy's phrase in Greek to be included (fortunately I am
providing CRC so no problem with the printer). It would be interesting to
know what small fraction of 1 percent of the eventual readers will
understand it; not many Greek or classicist mountaineers visit the range.
Yours sincerely,
Henry Osmaston
Osmaston finished the new guidebook two weeks before
he died |
