Mountains of the Moon

The Mountains of the Moon were a mountain range in Central Africa, bordering on the Lake Regions of the Rift Valley. They were the stronghold of a large population of the Mal'akh, particularly, the remains of the High Place. As a result of this, there are many conflicting accounts of the range's whereabouts, and it has been has been placed in several different locations by geographers.

The colony was discovered by James Bruce's expedition into the area in 1768-73. In 1857, the Star Chamber sent Richard Francis Burton and John Hanning Speke on a follow-up mission to find the source of the Nile, and officially they discovered Lake Tanganyika and Lake Nyanza. However, Burton's journals describe their journeys past Tanganyika into the heartland of the Ma’lakh race.

After the harrowing ordeal, Speke threatened to reveal the secrets of the Mal'akh and the Star Chamber alike. He was assassinated by Lord Byron in 1864 to prevent the events of the exploration from becoming public; Burton, who had argued bitterly against the necessity of the murder, challenged Byron to a duel and defeated him resoundly.

At one point, the Star Chamber considered attacking the unstable time-fields of the Mountains with the Musical Offering they used to assault the Eleven-Day Empire in 1834. However, nothing came of these plans.

The proximity of the Mountains of the Moon to Lake Turkana and the Rift Valley, the oldest sites of proto-human occupation in Africa, led many scholars in both the Star Chamber and Faction Paradox to speculate that the Mal'akh may have tampered in some way with the development of humanity. (PROSE: The Book of the War)