There was a Time
There was a time,
Now I can't trace its contours
A time when a strange fire
Burned in my breast
Alone in unspoilt reveries
I with a sorcerer's will
Conjure imagery of today
Imagery of walking across the confluence
Imagery of jumping over Kilimanjaro
And this lass who made my soul to soar
Around whom like the only stream in a village
I built the huts of my dreams
Today, alone in a place far from where
In my reveries of yore I set up myself
Today, here I am in a place outside of my moon
Alone, looking at the sun fading away
Alone, staring at the trees in the distant
And my reveries seem a broken egg.
The woman has left and even the ghost
Of my former dreams kept eluding me.
Am I not a leper to the world I once dreamt?
Burned in my breast
Alone in unspoilt reveries
I with a sorcerer's will
Conjure imagery of today
Imagery of walking across the confluence
Imagery of jumping over Kilimanjaro
And this lass who made my soul to soar
Around whom like the only stream in a village
I built the huts of my dreams
Today, alone in a place far from where
In my reveries of yore I set up myself
Today, here I am in a place outside of my moon
Alone, looking at the sun fading away
Alone, staring at the trees in the distant
And my reveries seem a broken egg.
The woman has left and even the ghost
Of my former dreams kept eluding me.
Am I not a leper to the world I once dreamt?
Tanzania's Mt Kilimanjaro, with its three volcanic cones, Kibo, Mawenzi, and Shira, is the highest mountain in Africa,5,895 m (19,341 ft). According to the Chagga people, a man named Tone was banished for provoking the god Ruwa into bringing famine upon the land, but he was aided by someone who had stones that turned into cattle; when tone failed to heed the warning to not open their stable, the cattle escaped and threw up hills to run on, including Mawenzi and Kibo. In another tale, Kibo badly beat his neighbor Mawenzi for falsely claiming that embers Kibo gave him had burned out, explaining both the peak's degraded condition and the origin of its name (the Battered"). Aeschylus had claimed that Egypt was nurtured by a mountain's snows, and Herodotus by a spring between two mountains, probably Mt. Kenya and Kilimanjaro; the astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus mentioned a "Moon Mountain" and a spring lake of the Nile; early in the 16th century Martín Fernández de Enciso visited Mombasa and, familiar with the ancient authors, wrote that "the Ethiopian Mount Olympus" west of the city was "exceedingly high, and beyond it are the Mountains of the Moon, in which are the sources of the Nile." In 1860 missionary Johann Ludwig Krapf claimed that its Kiswahili name meant "mountain of caravans," although he had said it was Wakamba term for "white mountain," a claim which Jim Thompson seconded in 1885 (though he favored its translation as "the mountain of greatness"). In 1889 Hans Meyer climbed its highest summit and named it Kaiser-Wilhelm-Apitze, but when newly independent Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged in 1964 to become the new nation of Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania (the United Republic of Tanzania) it was renamed Uhuru ("Freedom Peak" in Kiswahili).
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