Ursula Albinus

Kilimanjaro, the crowning height of Africa, has already been climbed by Britons and Germans, but .never until the other day by a woman. Now Fraulein Ursula Albinus has achieved the wonderful feat, reaching the summit, over 19,200 feet up in the air, by what we are told is a new route.

Whatever the path she trod, the achievement is magnificent, for all mountaineers who have essayed the climb declare it, for its height, one of the worst in the world. The climber has to face piercing winds and to encounter ice and vast sheets of treacherous slipping shingle which may slide with him down a slope and carry him to death ; arid when the crown is approached there lies a colossal crater, filled with eternal ice, from which flows a stream to form tlie River Pangani.

One of its peaks is known as Leopard Point, because when it was first climbed men found there an ibex and a leopard frozen to death. Evidently the leopard had been following its prey, and the mountain goat had fled higher and higher up the mountain in its efforts to escape ; finally, right at the summit, they both must have been caught in a blizzard and overwhelmed. How long they had been there no one can say.

This story reminds us of a curious find on the summit of Mont Blanc. When they were digging to find solid rock for the foundations for an observatory to be built there, they failed to find rock, but at a depth of twelve feet found a plum stone !

Sir, - The Capetown cable in to-day's "Herald" mentioning that a record had been I created by Fraulein Albinus in ascending Mount Kilimanjaro, 19,710 feet high, and the highest peak in Africa, shows what, a lone woman can do in nine days. Organised expeditions, using motors and mules, on the lower slopes, can perform the ascent and return in six days. Fraulein Albinus's solo achievement is a notable example of the physical endurance of many modern women, and in her choosing the formidable south-western side, instead of the less arduous south-eastern, exhibited a contempt for difficulties which compels admiration.

A countryman an of the Fraulein's - the missionary Johannes Rebmann - discovered Kilimanlarn in 1848, and two other Germans. Dr. Hans Meyer and Ludwig Purtschellor, were the first men to reach the summit in 1889. In African exploration, and even in the building up of the British Empire in Africa, in past years, Germans have played a notable and adventurous part, which it would be ungenerous not to recognise.