ABSTRACT
Ptolemy had never been to equatorial Africa but based his map and Guide to Geography on a variety of recorded sources. Marinus had recorded the voyage of a Greek merchant, Diogenes, who claimed to have traveled inland from the coast of East Africa for twenty-five days. Whatever the origins of the information contained on Ptolemy's maps and in his Guide to Geography, it came to represent most of what was known in Europe about the source of the Nile for the next 1,700 years. Beke was no stranger to Krapf since the two had met in Abyssinia. He respected Krapf and his intellectual integrity and opined that Kilimanjaro and Kenya were part of Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon. Lake Baringo, he said, was fed by the snows of Mount Kilimanjaro and Mount Kenya, which he now claimed were really Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon.
