Last Chance To See Part 4

One was a large and fairly friendly man who occasionally offered us cigarettes and the other was a small, nasty man who kept on stealing ours. This is, of course, the cla.s.sic interrogation method, designed to bring the victim to the brink of pathetic emotional breakdown. It's obviously a technique they learnt somewhere and have just found the habit hard to break, even though all they actually wanted to know from us was our names, pa.s.sport numbers and the serial numbers of every single piece of equipment we had with us.

The big man in particular seemed to wish us no personal ill as he guided us gently through the insanity to which it was his duty to subject us, and I came to recognise a feeling I've heard described when oddly close and touching relations.h.i.+ps develop between torturers and their victims or kidnappers and their hostages. There is a feeling of all being in this together. The forms we had to fill in were headed 'Belgian Congo', crossed out, with 'Zaire' written in in pencil, which meant that they had to be at least eighteen years old. The only form they didn't seem to have was the only one we actually wanted. We had been warned by friends that we had to get ourselves a currency declaration form when we entered Zaire or we would hit trouble later on. We repeatedly asked for one, but they said they had run out. They said we could get one in Goma and that would be all right.

They toyed with the idea of confiscating my Cambridge Z88 laptop computer just in case we were planning to overthrow the government with it, but in the end the small nasty man merely confiscated Chris's car magazine on the grounds that he liked cars and then, for now, we were free.

We went into the town of Bukavu in a sort of taxi-like thing. The town turned out to be an enormous distance from the airport, probably at the insistence of the taxi-drivers. As we bounded along the appallingly rutted road that followed the margin of the lake and along which a significant proportion of the population of Zaire seemed to be walking, our driver kept on diving beneath the dashboard of the car for long periods at a time. I watched this with some alarm, which was severely increased when I eventually worked out what he was doing. He was operating the clutch by hand. I wondered whether to mention this to the others but decided that, no, it would only worry them. Mark later mentioned that we had not pa.s.sed any other motor vehicles at all on the drive, except for a couple of trucks which had been parked for so long that they no longer had any rear axles. I didn't notice this myself, because once I had identified what the driver was doing with the clutch I simply kept my eyes closed for the remainder of the journey.

When at last we arrived at the hotel, which was surprisingly airy and s.p.a.cious for such a dilapidated town as Bukavu was, we were rattled and exhausted and we started to yawn at each other a lot. This was a kind of unspoken code for being fed up with the sight of one another despite the fact that it was only six in the evening. We each went off to our respective rooms and sat in our separate heaps.

I sat by the window and watched as the sun began to go down over the lake, the name of which I couldn't remember because all the maps were in Mark's room. From this vantage point, Bukavu looked quite idyllic, situated on a peninsula which jutted into the lake. Lake Kivu. I remembered the name now. I was still feeling very jangled and jittery and decided that staring at the lake a bit might help.

It was placid and silvery, shading to grey in the distance where it met the fading shapes of the hills that surrounded it. That helped.

The early evening light cast long shadows over the old Belgian colonial houses that were stepped down the hill from the hotel, huddled about with bright blossoms and palm trees. That was good too. Even the green corrugated roofs of the cruder new buildings were soothed by the light. I watched the black kites wheeling out over the water and found that I was calming down. I got up and started to unpack the things I needed for the night and at last a wonderful sense of peace and well-being settled on me, disturbed only by the sudden realisation that I had once again left my toothpaste in last night's hotel. And my writing paper. And my cigarette lighter. I decided it was time to explore the town.

The main street was a grim hill, wide, dishevelled and strewn with rubbish. The shops were for the most part concrete and dingy, and because Zaire is an ex-Belgian colony every other shop is a pharmacie, just like in Belgium and France, except that none of them, as it happened, sold toothpaste, which bewildered me.

Most of the other shops were in fact impossible to identify. When a shop appeared to sell a mixture of ghetto blasters, socks, soap and chickens, it didn't seem unreasonable to go in and ask if they'd got any toothpaste or paper stuck away on one of their shelves as well, but they looked at me as if I was completely mad. Couldn't I see that this was a ghetto blaster, socks, soap and chicken shop? Eventually, after trailing up and down the street for half a mile in either direction I found both of them at a tiny street stall which also turned out to sell biros, airmail envelopes and cigarette lighters, and in fact seemed to be so peculiarly attuned to my needs that I was tempted to ask if they had a copy of New Scientist as well.

I then realised that most of the essentials of life were available out on the street. Photocopying, for example. Here and there along the street were rickety trestle tables with big old photocopiers on them, and I had once or twice been hailed by a street hustler and asked if I wanted to have something photocopied or sleep with his sister. I returned to the hotel, wrote some notes on the writing paper, which for some reason was pink, and slept as if I were dead.

The following morning we flew to the town of Goma. Here we discovered that even when making internal flights in Zaire you still had to go through the full rigmarole of immigration and customs controls all over again. We were held under armed guard while a large and thuggish airport official interrogated us in his office as to why we hadn't acquired any currency declaration forms at Bukavu.

The fact that they hadn't had any currency declaration forms to give us at Bukavu cut no ice with him.

'Fifty dollars,' he said.

His office was large and bare and contained just one small desk with two sheets of paper in a drawer. He leant back and stared at the ceiling, which had obviously seen a lot of this sort of thing going on. Then he leant forward again and pulled the palms of his hands slowly down over his face as if he were trying to peel it off. He said again, 'Fifty dollars. Each,' and then stared idly at the corner of his desk and rolled a pencil slowly in his fingers. We were subjected to an hour of this before he finally tired of our appalling French and let us go.

We emerged blinking from the airport and, miraculously, met up with the driver that some friends of Mark's had organised to take us up into the Virunga volcanoes where the mountain gorillas lived.

The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaire to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaire and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I'm not sure that that's an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there's a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don't find out you're in town. At least with the gorillas you know that there's no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity. They are, of course, only collateral relatives - nth cousins, n times removed. We are both descended from a common ancestor, who is, sadly, no longer with us, and who has, since Darwin's day, been the subject of endless speculation as to what manner of creature he/she was.

The section of the primate family of which we are members (rich, successful members of the family, the ones who made good and who should, by any standards, be looking after the other, less well-off members of the family) are the great apes. We do not actually call ourselves great apes, though. Like many of the immigrants at Ellis Island, we have changed our names. The family we call the great apes includes the gorillas (of which there are three subspecies: mountain, eastern lowland and western lowland), two species of chimpanzee, and the orang utans of Borneo and Sumatra. We do not like to include ourselves in it - in fact the cla.s.sification 'Great Apes' was originally created specifically to drive a wedge between us and them. And yet it is now widely accepted that the gorillas and chimpanzees separated from us on the evolutionary tree more recently than they did from other great apes. This would mean that the gorillas are more closely related to us than they are to the orang utans. Any cla.s.sification which includes gorillas and orang utans must therefore include us as well. one way or another, we and the gorillas are very very close relatives indeed -almost as close to each other as the Indian elephant and the African elephant which also share a common, extinct ancestor.

The Virunga volcanoes, where the mountain gorillas live, straddle the border of Zaire, Rwanda and Uganda. There are about 280 gorillas there, roughly two-thirds of which live in Zaire, and the other third in Rwanda. I say roughly, because the gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of pa.s.sports, currency declaration forms and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backwards and forwards across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them. A few stragglers even pop over into Uganda from time to time, but there are no gorillas actually living there as permanent residents because the Ugandan part of the Virungas only covers about twenty-five square kilometres, is unprotected and full of people whom the gorillas, given the choice, would rather steer clear of.

The drive from Goma takes about five hours, and we made the hastiest departure we could manage after two and a half hours of serious madness with a ticket agent, a hotel manager, a lunch break and one of the larger national banks, which it would be tedious to relate, but not half as tedious as it was to undergo.

Things. .h.i.t a limit, though, when I was set upon by a pickpocket in a baker's shop.

I didn't notice that I was being set upon by a pickpocket, which I am glad of, because I like to work only with professionals. Everybody else in the shop did notice, however, and the man was hurriedly manhandled away and ejected into the street while I was still busy choosing buns. The baker tried to tell me what had happened but my Zairois French wasn't up to it and I thought he was merely recommending the curranty ones, of which I therefore bought six.

Mark arrived at that moment with some tinned pears, our gorilla permits and our driver, who quickly understood what was going on and explained to me what had happened. He also explained that the currant buns were no good, but said we might as well keep them because none of the others was any good either and we had to have something. He was a tall, rangy Muslim with an engaging smile, and he responded very positively to the suggestion that we should now get the h.e.l.l out of here.

When people talk of 'darkest Africa', it's usually Zaire they have in mind. This is the land of jungles, mountains, enormous rivers, volcanoes, more exotic wildlife than you'd be wise to shake a stick at, hunter-gatherer pygmies who are still largely untouched by western civilisation, and one of the worst transport systems anywhere in the world. This is the Africa in which Stanley presumed to meet Dr Livingstone.

Until the nineteenth century this enormous tract of Africa was simply a large black hole in the centre of any European map of the dark continent but it was only after Livingstone's penetration of the interior that the black hole began to exercise any gravitational effect on the outside world.

The first people to pour in were the missionaries: Catholics who arrived to teach the native populace that the Protestants were wrong and Protestants who came to teach that the Catholics were wrong. The only thing the Protestants and Catholics agreed about was that the natives had been wrong for two thousand years.

These were closely followed by traders in search of slaves, ivory, copper and suitable land on which plantations could be established. With the help of Stanley, who was on a five-year contract to open up the interior of Africa, King Leopold of the Belgians successfully laid claim to this vast region in 1885 and promptly subjected its inhabitants to an exceptionally brutal and ruthless form of colonisation, thus giving them a practical and convincing demonstration of what 'wrong' actually meant.

When news of the worst atrocities leaked to the outside world, Leopold was forced to hand over 'his' land to the Belgian government, who took it upon themselves to do virtually nothing about it. But by the nineteen-fifties independence movements were sweeping across Africa and, after riots and appalling ma.s.sacres in the capital, Kinshasa, in 1959, the colonial authorities were shaken so badly that they granted independence the following year. The country eventually changed its name from the Belgian Congo to Zaire in 1971.

Zaire, incidentally, is about eighty times the size of Belgium.

Like most colonies, Zaire had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function of which was to refer decisions upwards to its colonial masters. Focal officials rarely had the power to do things, only to prevent them being done until bribed. So once the colonial masters are removed, the bureaucracy continues to thrash around like a headless chicken with nothing to do other than trip itself up, b.u.mp into things and, when it can get the firepower, shoot itself in the foot. You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.

Five hours of sleepy b.u.mping in the van brought us to Bukima, a village in the foothills of the Virungas which marks the point where the road finally gives up, and from which we had to travel on by foot.

Set a little way above the village, in front of a large square, was an absurdly grand ex-colonial building, empty except for an absurdly small office tucked into the back where a small man in an Army uniform pored over our gorilla permits with a grim air of bemus.e.m.e.nt, as if he'd never seen one before, or at least not for well over an hour. He then occupied himself with a short wave radio for a few minutes before turning to us and saying that he knew exactly who we were, had been expecting us, and that because of our contacts with the World Wildlife Fund in Nairobi he was going to allow us an extra day with the gorillas, and who the h.e.l.l were we anyway, and why had no one told him we were coming?

This seemed, on the face of it, to be unanswerable, so we left him to try and figure it out for himself while we went to look for some porters to help us with our baggage for the three hour walk up to the warden's but where we were to spend the night. They weren't hard to find. There was a large band of them gathered hopefully round our van and our driver was eager to know how many we needed to carry all our bags. He seemed to emphasise the word 'all' rather strongly.

There was a sudden moment of horrible realisation. We had been so keen to clear out of Goma as fast as possible that we had forgotten, a major part of our plan, which was to leave the bulk of our gear at a hotel in town. As a result of this oversight we had, more baggage with us than we actually needed to carry up to the gorillas.

A lot more.

As well as basic gorilla-watching kit - jeans, T-s.h.i.+rt, a sort of waterproof thing, a ton of cameras and tins of pears - there was also an immense store of dirty laundry, a suit and shoes for meeting my French publisher in Paris, a dozen computer magazines, a thesaurus, half the collected works of d.i.c.kens and a large wooden model of a Komodo dragon. I believe in travelling light, but then I also believe I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.

Hiding our considerable embarra.s.sment, we chose a team of porters to carry this little lot up into the Virunga volcanoes for us. They didn't mind. If we were prepared to pay them to carry d.i.c.kens and dragons up to the gorillas and back down again then they were perfectly happy to do it. White men have done much worse things in Zaire than that, but maybe not much sillier.

The trek up to the warden's but was strenuous, and involved plenty of stops for sharing our cigarettes and Coca-Cola with the bearers, while they frequently redistributed the bags of d.i.c.kens and computer magazines between themselves and experimented with different and novel methods of keeping them on their heads.

For much of the time we were tramping through wet fields of sago, and a foolish but happy thought suddenly occurred to me. We were walking through the only known anagram of my name - which is Sago Mud Salad. I speculated footlingly as to what possible cosmic significance there could be to this and by the time I had finally dismissed the thought, the light was fading and we had arrived at the hut, which was a fairly spartan wooden building, but new and quite well built.

A damp and heavy mist hung over the land, almost obscuring the distant volcano peaks. The evening was unexpectedly cold, and we spent it by the light of hissing Tilley lamps, eating our tinned pears and our single remaining bun, and talking in broken French to our two guides whose names were Murara and Serundori.

These were magnificently smooth characters dressed in military camouflage and black berets who slouched across the table languidly caressing their rifles. They explained that the reason for the get-up was that they were ex-commandos. All guides had to carry rifles, they told us, partly as protection against the wildlife, but more importantly in case they encountered poachers. Murara told us that he had personally shot dead five poachers. He explained with a shrug that there was pas de probleme about it. No bother with inquests or anything like that, he just shot them and went home.

He sat back in his chair and idly fingered the rifle sight while we toyed nervously with our pear halves.

Poaching of one kind or another is, of course, the single most serious threat to the survival of the mountain gorillas but it's hard not to wonder whether declaring open season on human beings is the best plan for solving the problem. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.

In fact the poaching problem is declining - or at least parts of it are. Four in every five of the gorillas alive in the world's zoos today were originally taken from the wild, but no public zoo would accept a gorilla now, except from another zoo, since it would be a bit difficult to explain where it came from.

However, there is still a demand for them from private collectors, and the unprotected Ugandan part of the Virungas is still a weak link. In September 1988 an infant was captured on the Ugandan side: two adult members of its family were shot dead and the young animal was later sold to Rwandan smugglers by a game warden (now in prison) for about 15,000. This is the most destructive aspect of this sort of poaching - for every young gorilla captured, several other members of its family will probably die trying to protect it.

Worse than those who want to collect gorillas for their private zoos are those who just want to collect bits of gorillas. For many years there was a brisk trade in skulls and hands which were sold to tourists and expatriates who mistakenly thought they would look finer on their mantelpieces than they did on the original gorilla. This, thank goodness, is also now declining since a taste for bone-headed brutality is now held to be less of a social grace than formerly.

In some parts of Africa gorillas are still killed for food, though not in the Virunga volcanoes - at least, not deliberately. The problem is that many other animals are, and gorillas very frequently get caught in traps set for bushbuck or duiker. A young female gorilla called Jozi, for example, caught her hand in a wire antelope snare and eventually died of septicaemia in August 1988. So to protect the gorillas, anti-poaching patrols are still necessary.

There were two other people sharing our but that evening. They were a couple of German students whose names I appear now to have forgotten, but since they were indistinguishable from all the other German students we had encountered from time to time on our trips I will simply call them Helmut and Kurt.

Helmut and Kurt were young, fair-haired, vigorous, incredibly well equipped, and much better than us at virtually everything. We saw very little of them during the early part of the evening because they were very busy preparing their meal. This involved constructing some kind of brick oven outside, and then doing a lot of coming and going with bowls of boiling water, stopwatches, penknives and dismembered bits of the local wildlife. Eventually they sat and ate their feast in front of us with grim efficiency and an insulting refusal to make any disparaging glances at all in the direction of our tinned pear halves.

Then they said they were going to bed for the night, only they weren't going to sleep in the but because they had a tent with them, which was much better. It was a German tent. They nodded us a curt good night and left.

In bed that night, after I had lain awake for a while worrying about Murara and Serundori's casual propensity for shooting people, I turned to worrying instead about Helmut and Kurt. If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoke a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wis.h.i.+ng you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.

Mark had told me before we went to bed that when I woke up the first thing I had to remember was to turn my boots upsidedown and shake them.

I asked him why.

'Scorpions,' he replied, 'Good night.'

Early in the morning Murara and Serundori were waiting at the but door fondling their rifles and machetes, and wearing meaningful glints in their eyes that we weren't at all certain we liked. However, they had good news for us. Since gorillas tend not to make their personal arrangements to suit the convenience of visiting collateral relatives, they were sometimes to be found up to eight hours' trek away from the warden's hut. Today, however, the news was that they were only about an hour's distance from us, so we would have an easy day of it. We gathered together our gorilla-watching gear, carefully leaving behind the dragon, the d.i.c.kens and also our flash guns, on the a.s.sumption that these were all things that would, to differing degrees, upset the gorillas, said good morning to Helmut and Kurt, who were joining us for the expedition, and set off together in search of the gorillas. Ahead of us through the misty morning light reared the hump of Mikeno volcano.

The forest we plunged into was thick and wet and I complained about this to Mark.

He explained that gorillas like to live in 'montane' rain forest, or cloud forest. It was over 3,000 metres above sea-level, above the cloud level, and always damp. Water drips off the trees the whole time.

'It's not at all like lowland primary rain forest,' said Mark, 'more like secondary rain forest, which is what you get when primary forest is burnt or cut down and then starts to regenerate.'

'I thought that the whole problem with rain forest was that it wouldn't grow again when you cut it down,' I said.

'You won't get primary rain forest again, of course. Well, you might get something similar over hundreds or thousands of years, we don't know. Certainly all of the original wildlife will have been lost for good. But what grows in the short term is secondary rain forest, which is far less rich and complex.

'Primary rain forest is an incredibly complex system, but when you're actually standing in it it looks half empty. In its mature state you get a very high, thick canopy of leaves, because of all the trees competing with each other to get at the sunlight. But since little light penetrates this canopy there will tend to be very little vegetation at ground level. Instead you get an ecological system which is the most complex of any on earth, and it's all designed to disseminate the energy which the trees have absorbed from the sun throughout the whole forest.

'Cloud forest, like this, is much simpler. The trees are much lower and more s.p.a.ced out so there is plenty of ground cover vegetation as well, all of which the gorillas like very much because it means they can hide. And there's plenty of food within arm's reach.'

For us, however, all the thick, wet vegetation made the forest hard work to fight through. Murara and Serundori swung their machetes so casually through the almost impenetrable under growth that it took me a while to begin to see that there was more to it than just vague hacking.

Machetes are a very specific shape, a little like the silhouette of a banana with a fattened end. Every part of the blade has a slightly different curve or angle of cut to the line of movement, and a different weight behind, it as well. It was fascinating to watch the instinctive ways in which, from one slash to another, the guides would adapt their stroke to the exact type of vegetation they were trying to cut through - one moment it would be a thick branch, another moment it would be banks of nettles and another moment tangled hanging vines. It was like a very casual game of tennis played by highly skilled players.

Not only was the forest thick, it was also cold, wet and full of large black ants which bit all of us except for Helmut and Kurt who were wearing special ant-proof socks which they had brought with them from Latvia.

We complimented them on their foresight and they shrugged and said it was nothing. Latvians were always well prepared. They looked at our recording equipment and said that they were surprised that we thought it was adequate. They had much better tape recorders than that in Latvia. We said that that might very well be so, but that we were very happy with it and the BBC seemed to think it was fine for the job. Helmut (or was it Kurt?) explained that they had much better broadcasting corporations in Latvia.

The outbreak of outright hostilities was happily averted at this moment by a signal from our guides to keep quiet. We were near the gorillas.

'But of course,' said Kurt, with a slight smile playing along his thin Latvian lips, as if he'd known all the while that this was exactly where the gorillas would be.

But it wasn't a gorilla itself that had attracted our guides' attention, it was a gorilla's bed. By the side of the track along which we were walking there was a large depression in the undergrowth where a gorilla had been sleeping for the night.

Plant stems had been pulled down and folded under to keep the gorilla off the ground which was cold and damp at night.

One of the characteristics that laymen find most odd about zoologists is their insatiable enthusiasm for animal droppings. I can understand, of course, that the droppings yield a great deal of information about the habits and diets of the animals concerned, but nothing quite explains the sheer glee that the actual objects seem to inspire.

A sharp yelp of joy told me that Mark had found some. He dropped to his knees and started to fire off his Nikon at a small pile of gorilla dung.

'It's in the nest,' he explained once he had finished, 'which is very interesting, you see. The mountain gorillas, the ones that live here, actually defecate in their nests because it's too cold to get up at night. The western lowland gorillas, on the other hand, don't. They live in a warmer climate, so getting up in the middle of the night is less of a problem. Also, the western lowland gorillas live on a diet of fruit which is another incentive for not s.h.i.+tting in their nests.'

'I see,' I said.

Helmut started to say something, which I like to think was probably something about having far superior types of gorilla dung in Latvia, but I interrupted him because I suddenly had one of those strange, uncanny feelings that I was being watched by a truck.

We kept very quiet and looked very carefully around us. There was nothing we could see near us, nothing, in the trees above us, nothing peering furtively from the bushes. It was a moment or two before we saw anything at all, but then at last a slight movement caught our eyes. About thirty yards away down the track we were following, standing in plain view, was something so big that we hadn't even noticed it. It was a mountain gorilla, or perhaps I should say a gorilla mountain, standing propped up on its front knuckles so that it a.s.sumed the shape of a large and muscular sloping ridge tent.

You will have heard it said before that these creatures are awesome beasts, and I would like to add my own particular perception to this: these creatures are awesome beasts. It is hard to know how better to put it. A kind of humming mental paralysis grips you when you first encounter a creature such as this in the wild, and indeed there is no creature such as this. All sorts of wild and vertiginous feelings well up into your brain, that you seem to have no connection with and no name for, perhaps because it is thousands or millions of years since such feelings were last aroused.

I'm going to be a bit fanciful for moment, because it is very hard not to be when your rational, civilised brain (f use the words in the loosest possible sense) experiences things it has no way of recognising or accounting for but which are nevertheless very powerful.

I've heard an idea proposed, I've no idea how seriously, to account for the sensation of vertigo. It's an idea that I instinctively like and it goes like this.

The dizzy sensation we experience when standing in high places is not simply a fear of falling. It's often the case that the only thing likely to make us fall is the actual dizziness itself, so it is, at best, an extremely irrational, even self-fulfilling fear. However, in the distant past of our evolutionary journey towards our current state, we lived in trees. We leapt from tree to tree. There are even those who speculate that we may have something birdlike in our ancestral line. In which case, there may be some part of our mind that, when confronted with a void, expects to be able to leap out into it and even urges us to do so. So what you end up with is a conflict between a primitive, atavistic part of your mind which is saying, jump!' and the more modern, rational part of your mind which is saying, 'For Christ's sake, don't.'

Certainly the dizzy experience of vertigo seems to have far more in common with feelings of oscillating mental conflict and confusion than it does with simple fear. If it is a fear, it's one we love to play with and tease ourselves with, which is how designers of big dippers and Ferris wheels make a living.

The feeling I had looking at my first silverback gorilla in the wild was vertiginous. It was as if there was something I was meant to do, some reaction that was expected of me, and I didn't know what it was or how to do it. My modern mind was simply saying, 'Run away!' but all I could do was stand, trembling, and stare. The right moment for something seemed to slip away and fall into an unbridgeable gulf between us and the gorilla, and left us simply gawping helplessly on our side. The gorilla, meanwhile, seemed to notice that we had been busy photographing its dung and merely stalked off into the undergrowth.

We set off to follow it, but it was in its own element and we were not. We were not even able to tell whereabouts in its own element it was and after a while we gave up and started to explore the area more generally again.

The gorilla we had seen was a large male silverback. 'Silverback' simply means that its back was silver, or grey-haired. Only the backs of males turn silver, and it happens after the male has reached maturity. Tradition has it that only the chief male of a group will develop a silver back, and that it will happen within days, or even hours, of it taking over as leader, but this apparently is nonsense. Popular and beguiling nonsense, but nonsense. And while we are on the subject of nonsense I should mention something that we discovered a few days later when talking to Conrad Aveling, a field researcher in Goma who has for years been responsible for gorilla conservation work in the area.

We told Conrad how alarmed we had been by Murara and Serundori's accounts of simply going out and mowing down the local poachers, and he sat back in his chair, kicked up his heels and roared with laughter.

'It's incredible what these guys will tell the tourists! I bet they told you they were ex-commandos as well, did they?

We admitted, rather sheepishly, that they had. Conrad clasped his hand to his brow and shook his head.

'The only thing about them that's ex-commando,' he said, 'is their uniforms. They buy them off the commandos. The commandos sell them to buy food because they hardly ever get paid. It's all complete nonsense. I heard another great story the other day. A tourist had asked a guide - and this was at Rawindi where there are no gorillas - the tourist asked, "What happens when a gorilla meets a lion?" And instead of answering, "Well, that's a silly question, because lions and gorillas live in completely different areas and would never ever meet," the guide obviously feels obliged to think of some sort of colourful answer. So he says, "What happens is that the gorilla beats the h.e.l.l out of the lion, then wraps his body in leaves and twigs and then stamps on him." I only heard about it myself because the tourist came to me afterwards and said how fascinated he had been to hear about it. It bothers me when they make up these colourful answers. I wish I could make them understand that if they don't know the answer, or they think the right answer isn't very interesting, it's better to say so rather than just invent absolute nonsense.'

One thing that was beyond dispute, however, was that when our guides were not inventing stuff or acting out Rambo fantasies, they really knew the forest, and they really knew the gorillas. They had (and Conrad Aveling confirmed all this enthusiastically) themselves 'habituated' two of the gorilla groups for human contact. 'Habituating' is a very long, complicated and delicate business, but, briefly, it is the process of contacting a group in the wild, and visiting them every day, if you can find them, over a period of months or even years and training them to accept the presence of human beings, so that they can then be studied and also visited by tourists.

The length of time it takes to habituate gorillas depends on the dominant silverback. He's the one whose confidence you have to win. In the case of the family group we were visiting it took fully three years. Conrad Aveling spent the first eight months of his time on the project crawling around in the undergrowth with them, but never actually saw them once, though he was often no more than twenty or thirty feet away.

'One of the problems of habituating in this sort of habitat,' he explained, 'is that it's so thick you can't see each other and what happens is you end up having these sudden confrontations at about three or four metres or less, and you still can't see each other. Everybody's jumping out of their skin. The gorilla's jumping out of his skin, I'm jumping out of mine. It's extremely exciting. You get a real adrenalin rush. A problem with the Bukavu group was that the silverback wouldn't charge. I actually wanted him to, because then, having charged, he would expose himself and then realise that I didn't mean him any harm. But he wouldn't do that, he just kept circling. Usually they do charge, and if they do you have this face-to-face, and you have a moment to understand that neither of you means the other any harm and the gorilla backs off.'

'But you go into a submissive posture, do you? asked Mark. 'You don't confront him??

'No, I usually don't go into a submissive posture. I'm usually too frightened to move.'

Once a silverback accepts humans, the rest of the group will quickly fall into line, and, interestingly enough, any other groups in the area will usually become habituated much more quickly. There is hardly ever any trouble provided everybody treats everybody else with respect. The gorillas are perfectly capable of making it clear when they don't wish to be disturbed. There was one occasion on which a gorilla group had had a particularly stressful morning as a result of an encounter with another gorilla group, and the last thing they wanted was to be bothered with humans in the afternoon, so when a tracker brought some tourists and overstayed his welcome the silverback took hold of the tracker's hand and gently bit his watch off.

Now the business of tourism is obviously a vexed one. I had myself wanted to visit the gorillas for years, but had been deterred by the worry that tourism must be disturbing to the gorillas' habitat and way of life. There is also the risk of exposing the gorillas to diseases to which they have no immunity. It is well known that the famous and extraordinary pioneer of gorilla conservation, Dian Fossey, was for most of her life pa.s.sionately opposed to tourism and wished to keep the world away from the gorillas. However, she did, reluctantly, change her mind towards the end of her life, and the prevalent view now is that tourism, if it's carefully controlled and monitored, is the one thing that can guarantee the gorillas' future survival. The sad but unavoidable fact is that it comes down to simple economics. Without tourists it's only a question of which will happen first - either the gorillas' forest habitat will be entirely destroyed for crop farming and firewood, or the gorillas will be hunted to extinction by poachers. Put at its crudest, the gorillas are now worth more to the locals (and the government) alive than dead.

The restrictions, which are tightly enforced, are these. Each gorilla family can only be visited once a day, usually for about an hour, by a party of a maximum of six people, each of whom are paying US$100 for the privilege. And maybe they won't even get to see the gorillas.

We were lucky; we did. Though after our first brief encounter with the silverback it looked, for a while, as if we would not find any more. We moved slowly and carefully through the undergrowth, while Murara and Serundori made regular coughing and grunting noises. The purpose of these was to let the gorillas know we were coming and rea.s.sure them that we meant no harm. The noises are imitations of a noise that gorillas themselves make. Apparently it doesn't actually matter much about trying to imitate them, though. It's hardly going to fool anyone. It just rea.s.sures the gorillas that you always make the same noise. You could sing the national anthem as far as they are concerned.

Just as we were about to give up and go back, we tried one more turning, and suddenly the forest seemed to be thick with gorillas. A few feet above us a female was lounging in a tree idly stripping the bark off a twig with her teeth. She noticed us but was not interested. Two babies were cavorting recklessly four metres from the ground in a very slender tree, and a young male was chugging through the undergrowth nearby on the lookout for food. We stared at the two babies in astounded fascination at the wonderful wild abandon with which they were hurling themselves round each other and the terrible meagreness of the tree in which they had elected to do it. It was hard to believe the tree could support them, and indeed it couldn't. They suddenly came cras.h.i.+ng down through it, having completely misunderstood the law of gravity, and slunk off sheepishly into the undergrowth.

We followed, encountering one gorilla after another until at last we came across another silverback lying on his side beneath a bush, with his long arm folded up over his head scratching his opposite ear while he watched a couple of leaves doing not very much. It was instantly clear what he was doing. He was mooching. It was quite obvious. Or rather, the temptation to find it quite obvious was absolutely overwhelming.

They look like humans, they move like humans, they hold things in their fingers like humans, the expressions which play across their faces and in their intensely human-looking eyes are expressions which we instinctively feel we recognise as human expressions. We look them in the face and we think, 'We know what they're like,' but we don't. Or rather we actually block off any possible glimmering of understanding of what they may be like by making easy and tempting a.s.sumptions.