The green-gold expanse of savanna; above it, the purple horizon-hiding haze; and above that, like a pyramid improbably suspended in the sky, the snows of Kilimanjaro.

"Great, high and unbelievably white in the sun," as Hemingway wrote, the continent of Africa — some would say our planet itself — has hardly anything to show more fair.

But the show could soon be over. The summit of Kilimanjaro is losing its ice so quickly that it could be barren dirt before the next decade is out. When the ice goes, it will take with it an irreplaceable 10-millennium record of the African climate, a profitable tourist attraction and a source of beauty that is a joy to contemplate.

At first sight, the loss of Kilimanjaro's ice doesn't look like the sort of thing anyone could do much to stop. The mountain's year-round ice is mostly to be found in a handful of fields around the volcano's central crater. Though snow comes and goes from the mountain's flanks with the seasons, these summit ice fields have been shrinking for more than a century; from 1912 to 2000 four-fifths of their area vanished.

It is not clear that global warming is responsible for this precipitous retreat (retreating glaciers elsewhere, like those in the Alps, offer much more convincing smoking guns). But that does not clear humans of blame.

After all, it is reasonably suspicious that, after persisting for more than a hundred centuries, the ice began to vanish in the very century in which humans started to change the environment both globally and, perhaps more important, locally. It may well be that a regional change of some sort — deforestation, in all likelihood — has dried out the moist, rising winds that used to replenish the ice.

The question of what is destroying the ice, though, is less pressing than the question of whether anything can be done to save it. And the surprising answer to the second question is yes. You see, the two main ice fields on top of Kilimanjaro are big flat slabs with cliff-like faces.

According to scientists studying the mountain, it is melting from these cliffs — rather than from the flat tops of the fields — that seems to be the key to the problem.

Reading about this, Euan Nisbet, a Zimbabwean greenhouse gas specialist at The Royal Holloway College, University of London, was struck by a fairly simple solution: drape the cliffs in white polypropylene fabric. Sunlight bounces off, and the ice below stays cool. The result would look like a giant washing line: God's crisp, white sheets aired out three miles up in the sky.

Mr. Nisbet, whose family tree is thick with foresters, stresses that he doesn't see this as a permanent solution — but it would buy some decades, even a century, during which ways could be found to develop reforestation plans good for the mountain and the people who live beneath it.

The task of protecting the ice, while monumental, would not be impossible; the relatively small size of the ice fields is, after all, the whole point. In principle it would be well within the grasp of the world's grandmaster wrapper, Christo. "Running Fence," the Christo masterpiece that snaked through 25 miles of Sonoma and Marin Counties in California for a couple of weeks in 1976, would be easily long enough to girdle the two main ice fields.

Given that the cliffs are 60 to 150 feet high, their covering would have to be taller than "Running Fence"; but the total amount of fabric required would probably be no greater than that used for the bright pink skirts Christo spread out around the islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay in 1983.

Indeed, Christo and his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude, would make good consultants for the project; the team that convinced German parliamentarians to let them wrap the Reichstag might well persuade the Tanzanian government to allow the same thing to be done to the country's best-known feature.

Getting hundreds of thousands of square yards of fabric to the mountain top would be fairly easy — pack it up tightly and throw it out the back of a transport plane. Hanging it off the ice cliffs would be tricky, and require a lot of help. But it is hard to imagine that, if the money for such a project were to be found, the volunteers would not come running from around the world. And once the hanging is done, the main job would be over.

The rest of the preservation effort might just consist of a few snow machines to keep the top surface fresh and white in the months when no snow falls. The fresher the ice the more sunlight it reflects; the less light absorbed, the less the ice will melt.

The effort to preserve a square mile of ice in the equatorial sky could become a powerful local and universal symbol. Cloaking the ice cliffs of Kilimanjaro would not just borrow the techniques of an art installation — it would be a work of art in itself. Done properly, it would be a preservation of beauty that is itself, beautiful.

What's more, preserving the ice would be a way of saying that we do not have to accept environmental change, even when it looks inevitable. The white tarps would float above the clouds a tentative hope: the hope that human will and ingenuity just might be able to meet the challenges of a century in which more change will be faced, and more protection needed, than at any other time in human history — or Kilimanjaro's.

Oliver Morton is author of "Mapping Mars: Science, Imagination and the Birth of a World."

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

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