Mount Nyangani is not a difficult mountain. It is 2,592 metres high, the top of Zimbabwe, and a fit walker can be on the summit from the car park in a couple of hours. The trouble is the weather. Cloud comes up the eastern face from the Mozambique lowlands with no warning at all, and in a few minutes a sunny plateau becomes a white room in which you cannot see fifty metres. Then there are the ravines, which on the eastern side drop away steeply into forest. And then there are the stories.

The story everyone in Zimbabwe knows is from 1981. Two daughters of Tichaendepi Masaya, a government minister in the newly independent country, went walking on Nyangani with a family party. The girls went ahead. The mist came down. When it lifted, they were gone. The search that followed used helicopters, soldiers, police, rangers and volunteers, and went on for weeks. It found nothing: no clothing, no tracks, no remains. In the years since, some accounts have made them twins, and one newspaper put the year in the late 1980s. The family have never had anything to bury.

They are not the only ones. In January 2014 a young Harare man on a day walk with his wife and friends stepped away from the group to look at the view about halfway up and did not come back. The army, the air force and the police searched for him. He has not been found. Later the same year a British student went missing on the mountain for days and, unlike most, walked out alive. There are older, thinner cases of walkers who went up in good weather and were simply not on the mountain any more.

Ask the people who live under it and they will tell you the mountain is sacred, and that it has rules. Do not wear red on the slopes in the rainy season. Do not point at things. Do not comment on anything strange you come across, and you may come across something: a snake of colours you have never seen, a clay pot smoking with no fire under it, a brick of gold lying in the grass. Keep walking. Do not swear, do not sing modern songs, do not be intimate with anyone up there. If you break the rules, the mountain may keep you for a while, and it will let you go when it chooses, or not. Acting Chief Saunyama has said publicly that the parks authority should consult the chiefs before it sends people up, and a headman of the Nyanga family has argued that the area needs a chief installed to deal with what he called the spiritual side.

The parks authority has answered with rules of its own. Hikers now go up with a ranger, for a fee. Phones must be charged before you set out, and a torch with spare batteries is compulsory. Nobody goes up alone.

The plain explanation is that Nyangani is a big mountain with sudden fog and long falls, that a body in a forested ravine can take a very long time to find, and that hyenas and leopards do the rest. The people who have searched it will tell you that this is true and that it does not quite cover it. The searches were large. The mountain is not.

What the tradition and the rangers agree on is the advice. Go with somebody who knows the way, keep your voice down, and if the cloud comes in, stop where you are.