The rugged ice and snow bound peaks of Africa’s two highest mountains were on two separate occasions my destination when I worked on that continent as a foreign correspondent and journalist during the politically rumbustious 1950/60s period prior to African Independence.

In terms of African custom and belief, both former volcanoes were religiously held by an assortment of local tribes to be the homes of various ‘gods’ of significance and fear.

Some of these gods were considered to instil goodness in one at first sight while others were believed to be dangerous and their lair and resting places had to be well avoided at all times.

The two majestic mountains and former volcanoes in question were Mount Kilimanjaro, in Northern Tanganyika, and Mount Kenya, situated in the neighbouring State by that name.

Kilimanjaro is the bigger of the two with its peak reaching up to 19,341 feet in the old measure, or 5,895 metres in today’s language. This mystical and now extinct volcano is also recorded as being the world’s highest free-standing mountain, rising as it does above great stretches of dry African flatland.

Mount Kenya, on the other hand, reaches to a height of 5,199 metres but is more rugged to climb if one has to ascend to the very top — and particularly so if one has to travel sometimes on hands and knees up the steep and stark previously undefeated Western side.

Kilimanjaro first became a destination for me in May 1955 when an East African Airways’ DC3 aircraft went missing on a flight from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi.

When the aircraft carrying 20 people, including the Airline’s CEO, did not arrive at its destination, it was immediately assumed to have come to grief on Kilimanjaro, but subsequent detailed aerial surveillance failed to find it.

On hearing what sounded like a mystery to me, I immediately travelled to the base of Kilimanjaro with my photographer, believing that we may be able to locate any wreckage for an on-the-spot news story.

Although we had meticulously worked out on which side of the mountain the missing aircraft’s flight path would have crossed, our scrutineering of the area by foot and powerful binoculars proved fruitless but my very presence on the lower reaches of the mountain made me determined to get to know Kilimanjaro at a future time. I felt within my very being that the tribal gods had beckoned me to make another visit.

It took a group of tough rescue mountaineers four days before they discovered the remains of the stricken DC3 and the bodies of its 20 dead passengers and crew. They found that the aircraft had actually crashed in a direction totally opposite to its assumed flightpath.

When the accident was eventually analysed, evidence was publicly leaked that the airline’s chief executive officer had possibly asked the pilot to fly closer to the formidable mountain for closer scrutiny and viewing by a couple of special business guests who were accompanying him on what turned out to be a tragic last flight.

The DC3 had hit the one side of Kilimanjaro before colliding with a smaller adjacent volcano, known as Mawenzi, before ending up in a deep gully between the two mountains.

The crash and sad loss of life, however, was taken as a very serious omen by local tribespeople in the adjacent Arusha district to mean that the mountain gods were angry and that we humans had to atone for any misdeeds committed by us.

As I, too, had been affected in a directly opposite way by the interesting thought of mythical gods holding sway over Kilimanjaro, I jumped at a later opportunity to climb to the very top of this million-year-old volcano with a scientific team studying altitude sickness.

This particular exercise was to be part of an international investigation into why and how fighter pilots sometimes black out when in a steep dive in their supersonic aircraft.

The chief scientist was a North American, Dr. Ed Stevens, who had interestingly already been warned by an African baggage carrier not to scale the heights of Kilimanjaro as “the gods had already talked” over the DC3 crash.

Undaunted by this warning, Ed, his team and myself took off on a multi-day climb of the mountain, fortunately reaching the peak without any pre-warned mishap.

On the way down, however, three team members unexpectedly became extremely ill with some unidentifiable malady and, after publication of my article, I received word that the three men had to be heavily hospitalised in Nairobi before being medically repatriated overseas by special charter aircraft.

Whether or not they eventually recovered is not known to me but, to this very day, I often wonder whether the Kilimanjaro gods had anything psychically to do with the unfortunate sickness of the three affected scientists.

It was therefore with some trepidation that I joined forces with another scientific team intent on scaling — for the first time ever –the craggy western reaches of Mount Kenya as part of the United Nations’ International Geophysical Year studies held at different points of scientific interest throughout the world.

Part of the exercise was to scientifically measure how high up the unbelievably steep rock cranny-and-ravine- ridden mountainside we could take a new revolutionary German vehicle said to be capable of travelling over the most dangerous of earth’s terrain.

As I have since discovered, the S.E.S. serving us along the Clarence River here in Australia now possess one or more of the latest versions of these initial “wonder vehicles” simply known as “Unimogs.” These magical machines are now being employed here in New South Wales on important recovery work during such events as heavy flooding and fires in difficult and rocky circumstances, all without as much as a thought of possible angry gods secreted somewhere out of sight.

Meanwhile, back in Africa in those days, I was once again very aware on approaching Mount Kenya with the I.G.F people that most of the African tribes around Mount Kenya believed that this former volcano also housed gods who should not be aggravated by encroaching outsiders.

I held this thought closely in mind together with my Kilimanjaro experience as I took every step-up Mount Kenya’s western side, knowing it had never before been successfully climbed by the most adventurous of Africa’s original White explorers.

As a group, we unfortunately had to abandon the Unimog experiment at a fairly good height due to the dangerous mountainside but each of us luckily managed to reach the peak with only minor mishaps and without meeting up with any evidence of local tribal superstitions and their attendant hidden gods.

On our downward trip, however, a number of team members stirred my worst fears by complaining of not feeling at all well. My immediate reaction was, of course, whether we had done something to once again upset the mountain gods or was it simply a case of altitude sickness? Now, today, nearly 70 years on, that question still lurks in my mind when I think of my former days working between Cairo and Cape Town.

I have often mused over whether the two events were just coincidence or were they just simply a case of psycho driven fear and suggestion with we intruders failing to understand age-old African tribal beliefs?