But Kilimanjaro is not part of a widespread upheaval like Everest. It was a long time before people managed to work out which bit of the Himalayas was actually the highest, and the discovery was finally made, as I recall, on a desk in London. No such problem with Kilimanjaro. It’s volcanic and stands on its own, surrounded by a few footling little hills. When you finally get to see Killy, searching among the befuddling clouds on the horizon, your blood suddenly runs cold. “Oh,” you say at last, “you mean above the clouds.” Your whole head tilts upward. “Oh my god . . .” From base to apex, it is the tallest mountain in the world. It’s certainly a hell of a thing to climb in a rhino costume. This crackpot idea was first put to me months earlier by the founders of Save the Rhino International, David Stirling and Johnny Roberts, and I didn’t realise at first that they meant it. They raved on for a bit about having acquired a whole set of rhino costumes that Ralph Steadman had designed for an opera, and that they would be just the thing for making the ascent of Kilimanjaro in. They had already been used, David told me by way of reassurance, for running in the New York Marathon. “It’ll have enormous impact,” they said, “believe me. Really.”

I began to realise the truth of this as we approached our first village of the day, and perhaps now would be a good point to explain what the purpose of the whole expedition was. It was not, in fact, to raise money directly for rhino conservation. Rhinos, which used to be plentiful on the plains of East Africa, are now hideously rare, but in Kenya they are about as well conserved as they can be anywhere in Africa. Richard Leakey’s Kenya Wildlife Service consists of eight thousand well-trained, well-equipped, well-armed, highly motivated soldiers, and represents a formidable force. Too formidable, some of his opponents feel. Poaching in Kenya is, officially, “no longer a problem.” But conservation is a continually evolving business, and we have begun to realise that just wading into Africa and telling the local people that they mustn’t do to their wildlife what we’ve done to ours, and that we are there to make sure they don’t, is an attitude that, to say the least, needs a little refining.