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Why is the Ruwenzori Range called the Mountains of the Moon?
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East African mountains
Mountains and lakes of East Africa.
The Ruwenzori Range is identified as the "Mountains of the Moon" because the 2nd-century geographer Ptolemy described a range by that name, which was long believed to be the source of the Nile.
In 1888, the explorer Henry Morton Stanley caught a glimpse of the Ruwenzori through a break in the clouds and formally equated the range with Ptolemy’s legendary mountains. The association is reinforced by the fact that the summits of the Ruwenzori are frequently obscured by dense cloud cover, a phenomenon caused by moist air currents from the Atlantic and Indian oceans.12