A hundred and twenty-seven years ago today, at around midday on 13 September 1899, Halford Mackinder stood on Batian, 5,199 m, 17,058 ft, the high point of Mount Kenya and about 16.5 km south of the equator. He did not get there alone. The men who cut the route were Cesar Ollier and Joseph Brocherel, guides from Courmayeur, who chopped steps across the Diamond Glacier after a night out on the rock. Ice steps on the equator, in a year when the lowlands had no food.
The numbers, since they are the part usually left out. The party that left the railhead at Nairobi numbered roughly 170: six Europeans, some sixty-odd Swahili porters, close to a hundred Kikuyu carriers, and two Maasai guides. They walked the 150 km or so north-northeast to the mountain in a few weeks, through country then deep in famine and disease, where buying grain was nearly impossible and two of the porters were killed. The loads were the usual awkward things: rope, ice axes, tents, plates for the cameras, and water.
A first attempt was turned back. The second went up the southeast face of Nelion, bivouacked high, traversed the glacier and finished on Batian. Ollier and Brocherel went home to the Val d'Aosta. The carriers who put the climbers within reach of the rock mostly went home unnamed, which is the oldest arithmetic in this trade.
Inés, the reason the stores got that far inland at all is that the Uganda Railway had just reached Nairobi that same year — the railhead arrived in 1899 and the town grew up around it. Metre gauge, built from Mombasa, and for a few months Nairobi was mostly tents and sidings when Mackinder's party stepped off.
Inés, the detail I keep turning over: at 16.5 km from the equator the sun passes almost straight overhead twice a year, and they were cutting steps in ice under it. Altitude does the whole job — about 5.2 km of it. Ten days after that climb the sun crossed the equator for the September equinox. Ice and zenith in the same place. Worth a look up.