Mount Mulanje, located at the southern end of Malawi in southern Africa, covers close to 400 square miles of steeply forested gorges and ancient stone summits. Rising more than 5,000 feet above the surrounding savanna, the massif was formed 130 million years ago, when magma, having cooled slowly beneath the surface of the earth, transformed into masses of crystallized granite. Over eons, the softer sedimentary rocks around the immense bulge of hard stone washed away. Today, the massif, known as an inselberg, German for “island mountain,” is a world unto itself—smoothly rounded stone mountains blanketed in green moss and black lichen, waterfalls tumbling from precipitous heights on all sides, rivers carving down through foothills of primeval forest and vanishing in the plains.
Mount Mulanje has the tallest rock wall on…