Kitum Cave
— — a salt cave the elephants walk into at night.
Not only on a wall.
“A long lava-formed cave on Mount Elgon in western Kenya, near the Ugandan border. Elephants walk in after dark and tusk salt from the walls, slowly enlarging the cavity over generations. The cave reaches roughly two hundred metres into the mountainside. The forest above is wet and quiet, and a thin curtain of falling water crosses the entrance.
Kitum Cave, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kitum Cave lies on the eastern slopes of Mount Elgon, an extinct shield volcano on the border between Kenya and Uganda. The cave sits at roughly 2,400 metres elevation inside Mount Elgon National Park, which Kenya gazetted in 1968. Mount Elgon itself rises to 4,321 metres at Wagagai peak on the Ugandan side, making it the eighth-highest mountain in Africa. The cave extends about 200 metres into the rock and is formed in volcanic agglomerate rather than dissolved out of limestone, an unusual geology for a cave of its size.
Above the cave the slopes hold Afromontane forest of podocarpus, juniper, and bamboo, wrapped in cloud for much of the year. The forest carries colobus monkeys, buffalo, and a small population of forest elephants. At the entrance a stream falls across the opening, so the cave is reached by stepping through running water. Inside, the dark deepens within a few metres and sound carries unevenly along the gallery. The rangers who work the slope speak of the elephants as a nightly traffic, not a sighting.
Access is through Mount Elgon National Park, managed by the Kenya Wildlife Service from headquarters at Chorlim Gate near the town of Endebess. Visitors reach the cave on foot, typically accompanied by an armed ranger because of forest elephants and Cape buffalo on the slope. The cave entered scientific attention in the late 1980s as a possible source of Marburg virus, after two visitors who had spent time inside contracted the disease in 1980 and 1987. Access has since been managed cautiously by park staff.