Which mountain is the tallest in Africa?

Kilimanjaro, at 5,895 metres, and it is a freestanding volcano rather than part of a range - it rises about five kilometres from the surrounding plain, which is why it looks the way it does in every photograph. It is three volcanic cones in one, and the highest, Kibo, is dormant rather than extinct.

Walking up it passes through something like a compressed journey from the equator to the poles: farmland, then rainforest, then heath and moorland, then high alpine desert, then ice. Five climate zones in a few days, and the summit is cold enough for permanent ice at three degrees south of the equator.

That ice is nearly gone. The summit glaciers have lost something over 80 per cent of their area since 1912 and are now expected to disappear entirely within decades. The cause is argued - reduced precipitation and increased sublimation in dry air appear to matter more than air temperature - but the direction is not. It is also, unusually for a mountain of that height, walkable: no technical climbing is required, which is why tens of thousands attempt it each year and why altitude sickness is the main danger, since people ascend far faster than they should.