“We’re her troop,” Munro said. “She won’t let us get far.”

Several minutes later, Amy came crashing through the underbrush fifty yards ahead. She watched the group, and glared at Peter.

“Now come here, Amy,” Munro said, “and I’ll tickle you.” Amy bounded up and lay on her back in front of him. Munro tickled her.

“You see, Professor? Nothing to it.”

Amy never strayed far from the group again.

If Elliot had an uncomfortable sense of the rain forest as the natural domain of his own animal, Karen Ross viewed it in terms of earth resources—in which it was poor. She was not fooled by the luxuriant, oversized vegetation, which she knew represented an extraordinarily efficient ecosystem built in virtually barren soil.*

The developing nations of the world did not understand this fact; once cleared, the jungle soil yielded disappointing crops. Yet the rain forests were being cleared at the incredible rate of fifty acres a minute, day and night. The rain forests of the world had circled the equator in a green belt for at least sixty million years—but man would have cleared them within twenty years.

This widespread destruction had caused some alarm Ross did not share. She doubted that the world climate would change or the atmospheric oxygen be reduced. Ross was not an alarmist, and not impressed by the calculations of those who were. The only reason she felt uneasy was that the forest was so little understood. A clearing rate of fifty acres a minute meant that plant and animal species were becoming extinct at the incredible rate of one species per hour. Life forms that had evolved for millions of years were being wiped out

* The rain forest ecosystem is an energy utilization complex far more efficient than any energy conversion system developed by man. See C. F. Higgins et at., Energy Resources and Ecosystem Utilization (Englewood Cliffs, N.J. Prentice Hall, 1977). pp. 232—255.

every few minutes, and no one could predict the consequences of this stupendous rate of destruction. The extinction of species was proceeding much faster than anybody recognized, and the publicized lists of “endangered” species told only a fraction of the story; the disaster extended all the way down the animal phyla to insects, worms, and mosses.

The reality was that entire ecosystems were being destroyed by man without a care or a backward glance. And these ecosystems were for the most part mysterious, poorly understood. Karen Ross felt herself plunged into a world entirely different from the exploitable world of mineral resources; this was an environment in which plant life reigned supreme. It was no wonder, she thought, that the Egyptians called this the Land of Trees. The rain forest provided a hothouse environment for plant life, an environment in which gigantic plants were much superior to—and much favored over—mammals, including the insignificant human mammals who were now picking their way through its perpetual darkness.

The Kikuyu porters had an immediate reaction to the forest: they began to laugh and joke and make as much noise as possible. Ross said to Kahega, “They certainly are jolly.”

“Oh, no,” Kahega said. “They are warning.”

“Warning?”

Kahega explained that the men made noise to warn off the buffalo and leopards. And the tembo, he added, pointing to the trail.

“Is this a tembo trail?” she asked.

Kahega nodded.

“The tembo live nearby?”

Kahega laughed. “I hope no,” Kahega said. “Tembo. Elephant.”

“So this is a game trail. Will we see elephants?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Kahega said. “I hope no. They are very big, elephants.”

There was no arguing with his logic. Ross said, “They tell me these are your brothers,” nodding down the line of porters.

“Yes, they are my brothers.”

"Ah."

“But you mean that my brothers, we have the same mother?”

“Yes, you have the same mother.”

“No,” Kahega said.

Ross was confused. ‘You are not real brothers?”

“Yes, we are real brothers. But we do not have the same mother.”

“Then why are you brothers?”

“Because we live in the same village.”

“With your father and mother?”

Kahega looked shocked. “No,” he said emphatically. “Not the same village.”

“A different village, then?”

“Yes, of course—we are Kikuyu.”

Ross was perplexed. Kahega laughed.

Kahega offered to carry the electronic equipment that Ross had slung over her shoulder, but she declined. Ross was obliged to try and link up with Houston at intervals throughout the day, and at noon she found a clear window, probably because the consortium jamming operator took a break for lunch. She managed to link through and register another Field Time—Position.

The console read:      FILD TME—POSITN CHEK—10:03 H

They had lost nearly an hour since the previous check the night before. “We’ve got to go fester,” she told Munro.

“Perhaps you’d prefer to jog,” Munro said. “Very good exercise.” And then, because he decided he was being too hard on her, he added, “A lot can happen between here and Virunga.”

They heard the distant growl of thunder and minutes later were drenched in a torrential rain, the drops so dense and heavy that they actually hurt. The rain fell solidly for the next hour, then stopped as abruptly as it had begun. They were all soaked and miserable, and when Munro called a halt for food, Ross did not protest.

Amy promptly went off into the forest to forage; the porters cooked curried meat gravy on rice; Munro, Ross, and

Elliot burned leeches off their legs with cigarettes. The leeches were swollen with blood. “I didn’t even notice them,” Ross said.

“Rain makes ‘em worse,” Munro said. Then he looked up sharply, glancing at the jungle.

“Something wrong?”

“No, nothing,” Munro said, and he went into an explanation of why leeches had to be burned off; if they were pulled off, a part of the head remained lodged in the flesh and caused an infection.

Kahega brought them food, and Munro said in a low voice, “Are the men all right?”

“Yes,” Kahega said. “The men are all right. They will not be afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” Elliot said.

“Keep eating. Just be natural,” Munro said.

Elliot looked nervously around the little clearing.

“Eat!” Munro whispered. “Don’t insult them. You’re not supposed to know they’re here.”

The group ate in silence for several minutes. And then the nearby brush rustled and a pygmy stepped out.

2. The Dancers of God

HE WAS A LIGHT-SKINNED MAN ABOUT FOUR AND A half feet tall, barrel-chested, wearing only a loincloth, with a bow and arrow over his shoulder. He looked around the expedition, apparently trying to determine who was the leader.

Munro stood, and said something quickly in a language that was not Swahili. The pygmy replied. Munro gave him one of the cigarettes they had been using to burn off the leeches. The pygmy did not want it lit; instead he dropped it into a small leather pouch attached to his quiver. A brief conversation followed. The pygmy pointed off into the jungle several times.

“He says a white man is dead in their village,” Munro said. He picked up his pack, which contained the first-aid kit. “I’ll have to hurry.”

Ross said, “We can’t afford the time.”

Munro frowned at her.

“Well, the man’s dead anyway.”

“He’s not completely dead,” Munro said. “He’s not dead-for-ever.”

The pygmy nodded vigorously. Munro explained that pygmies graded illness in several stages. First a person was hot, then he was with fever, then ill, then dead, then completely dead—and finally dead-for-ever.

From the bush, three more pygmies appeared. Munro nodded. “Knew he wasn’t alone,” he said. “These chaps never are alone. Hate to travel alone. The others were watching us; if we’d made a wrong move, we’d get an arrow for our trouble. See those brown tips? Poison.”

Yet the pygmies appeared relaxed now—at least until Amy came crashing back through the underbrush. Then there were shouts and swiftly drawn bows; Amy was terrified and ran to Peter, jumping up on him and clutching his chest—and making him thoroughly muddy.

The pygmies engaged in a lively discussion among themselves, trying to decide what Amy’s arrival meant. Several questions were asked of Munro. Finally, Elliot set Amy back down on the ground and said to Munro, “What did you tell them?”

“They wanted to know if the gorilla was yours, and I said yes. They wanted to know if the gorilla was female, and I said yes. They wanted to know if you had relations with the gorilla; I said no. They said that was good, that you should

not become too attached to the gorilla, because that would cause you pain.”

“Why pain?”

“They said when the gorilla grows up, she will either run away into the forest and break your heart or kill you.”

Ross still opposed making a detour to the pygmy village, which was several miles away on the banks of the Liko River. “We’re behind on our timeline,” she said, “and slipping further behind every minute.”

For the first and last time during the expedition, Munro lost his temper. “Listen, Doctor,” he said, “this isn’t downtown Houston, this is the middle of the goddamn Congo and it’s no place to be injured. We have medicines. That man may need it. You don’t leave him behind. You just don’t.”

“If we go to that village,” Ross said, “we blow the rest of the day. It puts us nine or ten hours further back. Right now we can still make it. With another delay, we won’t have a chance.”

One of the pygmies began talking quickly to Munro. He nodded, glancing several times at Ross. Then he turned to the others.

“He says that the sick white man has some writing on his shirt pocket. He’s going to draw the writing for us.”

Ross glanced at her watch and sighed.

The pygmy picked up a stick and drew large characters in the muddy earth at their feet. He drew carefully, frowning in concentration as he reproduced the alien symbols: E R T S.

“Oh, God,” Ross said softly.

The pygmies did not walk through the forest: they ran at a brisk trot, slipping through the forest vines and branches, dodging rain puddles and gnarled tree roots with deceptive ease. Occasionally they glanced over their shoulders and giggled at the difficulties of the three white people who followed.

For Elliot, it was a difficult pace—a succession of roots to stumble over, tree limbs to strike his head on, thorny vines to tear at his flesh. He was gasping for breath, trying to keep up with the little men who padded effortlessly ahead of him. Ross was doing no better than he, and even Munro, although surprisingly agile, showed signs of fatigue.

Finally they came to a small stream and a sunlit clearing.

The pygmies paused on the rocks, squatting and turning their

faces up to the sun. The white people collapsed, panting and gasping. The pygmies seemed to find this hilarious, their laughter good-natured.

The pygmies were the earliest human inhabitants of the Congo rain forest. Their small size, distinctive manner, and deft agility had made them famous centuries before. More than four thousand years ago, an Egyptian commander named Herkouf entered the great forest west of the Mountains of the Moon; there he found a race of tiny men who sang and danced to their god. Herkoufs amazing report had the ring of fact, and Herodotus and later Aristotle insisted that these stories of the tiny men were true, and not fabulous. The Dancers of God inevitably acquired mythical trappings as the centuries passed.

As late as the seventeenth century, Europeans remained unsure whether tiny men with tails who had the power to fly through the trees, make themselves invisible, and kill elephants actually existed. That skeletons of chimpanzees were sometimes mistaken for pygmy skeletons added to the confusion. Colin Turnbull notes that many elements of the fable are actually true: the pounded-bark loincloths hang down and look like tails; the pygmies can blend into the forest and become virtually invisible; and they have always hunted and killed elephants.

The pygmies were laughing now as they got to their feet and padded off again. Sighing, the white people struggled up and lumbered after them. They ran for another half hour, never pausing or hesitating, and then Elliot smelled smoke and they came into a clearing beside a stream where the village was located.

He saw ten low rounded huts no more than four feet high, arranged in a semicircle. The villagers were all outside in the afternoon light, the women cleaning mushrooms and berries picked during the day, or cooking grubs and turtles on crackling fires; children tottered around, bothering the men who sat before their houses and smoked tobacco while the women worked.

At Munro’s signal, they waited at the edge of the camp until they were noticed, and then they were led in. Their arrival provoked great interest; the children giggled and pointed; the men wanted tobacco from Munro and Elliot; the women touched Ross’s blonde hair, and argued about it. A little girl crawled between Ross’s legs, peering up her trousers. Munro explained that the women were uncertain whether Ross painted her hair, and the girl had taken it upon herself to settle the question of artifice.

“Tell them it’s natural,” Ross said, blushing.

Munro spoke briefly to the women. “I told them it was the color of your father’s hair,” he told Ross. “But I’m not sure they believe it.” He gave Elliot cigarettes to pass out, one to each man; they were received with broad smiles and odd girlish giggles.

Preliminaries concluded, they were taken to a newly constructed house at the far end of the village where the dead white man was said to be. They found a filthy, bearded man of thirty, sitting cross-legged in the small doorway, staring outward. After a moment Elliot realized the man was catatonic—he was not moving at all.

“Oh, my God,” Ross said. “It’s Bob Driscoll.”

“You know him?” Munro said.

“He was a geologist on the first Congo expedition.” She leaned close to him, waved her hand in front of his face. “Bobby, it’s me, Karen. Bobby, what happened to you?”

Driscoll did not respond, did not even blink. He continued to stare forward.

One of the pygmies offered an explanation to Munro. “He came into their camp four days ago,” Munro said. “He was wild and they had to restrain him. They thought he had blackwater fever, so they made a house for him and gave him some medicines, and he was not wild anymore. Now he lets them feed him, but he never speaks. They think perhaps he was captured by General Muguru’s men and tortured, or else he is agudu—a mute.”

Ross moved back in horror.

“I don’t see what we can do for him,” Munro said. “Not in his condition. Physically he’s okay but...” He shook his head.

“I’ll give Houston the location,” Ross said, “and they’ll send help from Kinshasa.”

During all this, Driscoll never moved. Elliot leaned forward to look at his eyes, and as he approached, Driscoll wrinkled his nose. His body tensed. He broke into a high-pitched wail—”Ah-ah-ah-ah”—like a man about to scream.

Appalled, Elliot backed off, and Driscoll relaxed, falling silent again. “What the hell was that all about?”

One of the pygmies whispered to Munro. “He says,” Munro said, “that you smell like gorilla.”

            3. Ragora

Two HOURS LATER, THEY WERE REUNITED WITH Kahega and the others, led by a pygmy guide across the rain forest south of Gabutu. They were all sullen, uncommunicative—and suffering from dysentery.

The pygmies had insisted they stay for an early dinner, and Munro felt they had no choice but to accept. The meal was mostly a slender wild potato called kitsombe, which looked like a shriveled asparagus; forest onions, called otsa; and modoke, wild manioc leaves, along with several kinds of mushrooms. There were also small quantities of sour, tough turtle meat and occasional grasshoppers, caterpillars, worms, frogs, and snails.

This diet actually contained twice as much protein by weight as beefsteak, but it did not sit well on unaccustomed stomachs. Nor was the news around the campfire likely to improve their spirits.

According to the pygmies, General Muguru’s men had established a supply camp up at the Makran escarpment, which was where Munro was headed. It seemed wise to avoid the troops. Munro explained there was no Swahili word for chivalry or sportsmanship, and the same was true of the Congolese variant, Lingala. “In this part of the world, it’s kill or be killed. We’d best stay away.”

Their only alternate mute took them west, to the Ragora River. Munro frowned at his map, and Ross frowned at her computer console.

“What’s wrong with the Ragora River?” Elliot asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Munro said. “Depends on how hard it’s mined lately.”

Ross glanced at her watch. “We’re now twelve hours behind,” she said. “The only thing we can do is continue straight through the night on the river.”

“I’d do that anyway,” Munro said.

Ross had never heard of an expedition guide leading a party through a wilderness area at night. “You would? Why?”

“Because,” Munro said, “the obstacles on the lower river will be much easier at night.”

“What obstacles?”

“We’ll discuss them when we come to them,” Munro said.

A mile before they reached the Ragora, they heard the distant mar of powerful water. Amy was immediately anxious, signing What water? again and again. Elliot tried to reassure her, but he was not inclined to do much; Amy was going to have to put up with the river, despite her fears.

But when they got to the Ragora they found that the sound came from tumbling cataracts somewhere upstream; directly before them, the river was fifty feet wide and a placid muddy brown.

“Doesn’t look too bad,” Elliot said.

“No,” Munro said, “it doesn’t.”

But Munro understood about the Congo. The fourth largest river in the world (after the Nile, the Amazon, and the Yangize) was unique in many ways. It twisted like a giant snake across the face of Africa, twice crossing the equator— the first time going north, toward Kisangani, and later going south, at Mbandaka. This fact was so remarkable that even a hundred years ago geographers did not believe it was true.

Because the Congo flowed both north and south of the equator, there was always a rainy season somewhere along its path; the river was not subject to the seasonal fluctuations that characterized rivers such as the Nile. The Congo poured a steady 1,500,000 cubic feet of water every second into the Atlantic Ocean, a flow greater than any river except the Amazon.

But this tortuous course also made the Congo the least navigable of the great rivers. Serious disruptions began with the rapids of Stanley Pool, three hundred miles from the Atlantic. Two thousand miles inland, at Kisangani, where the river was still -a mile wide, the Wagenia Cataract blocked all navigation. And as one moved farther upriver along the fan of tributaries, the impediments became even more pronounced, for above Kisangani the tributaries were descending rapidly into the low jungle from their sources—the highland savannahs to the south, and the 16,000-foot snowcapped Ruwenzori Mountains to the east.

The tributaries cut a series of gorges, the most striking of which was the Portes d’Enfer—the Gates of Hell—at Kongolo. Here the placid Lualàba River funneled through a gorge half a mile deep and a hundred yards wide.

The Ragora was a minor tributary of the Lualaba, which it joined near Kisangani. The tribes along the river referred to it as baratawani, “the deceitful road,” for the Ragora was notoriously changeable. Its principal feature was the Ragora Gorge, a limestone cut two hundred feet deep and in places only ten feet wide. Depending on recent rainfall, the Ragora Gorge was either a pleasant scenic spectacle or a boiling whitewater nightmare.

At Abutu, they were still fifteen miles upriver from the gorge, and conditions on the river told them nothing about conditions within the gorge. Munro knew all that, but he did not feel it necessary to explain it to Elliot, particularly since at the moment Elliot was fully occupied with Amy.

Amy had watched with growing uneasiness as Kahega’s men inflated the two Zodiac rafts. She tugged Elliot’s sleeve and demanded to know What balloons?

“They’re boats, Amy,” he said, although he sensed she had already figured that out, and was being euphemistic. “Boat” was a word she had learned with difficulty; since she disliked water, she had no interest in anything intended to ride upon it.

Why boat? she asked.

“We ride boat now,” Elliot said.

Indeed, Kahega’s men were pushing the boats to the edge of the water, and loading the equipment on, lashing it to the rubber stanchions at the gunwales. -

Who ride? she asked.

“We all ride,” Elliot said.

Amy watched a moment longer. Unfortunately, everyone was nervous, Munro barking orders, the men working hastily. As she had often shown, Amy was sensitive to the moods of those around her. Elliot always remembered how she had insisted that something was wrong with Sarah Johnson for days before Sarah finally told the Project Amy staff that she had split up with her husband. Now Elliot was certain that Amy sensed their apprehension. Cross water in boat? she asked.

“No, Amy,” he said. “Not cross. Ride boat.”

No, Amy signed, stiffening her back, tightening her shoulders.

“Amy,” he said, “we can’t leave you here.”

She had a solution for that. Other people go. Peter stay Amy.

“I’m sorry, Amy,” he said. “I have to go. You have to go.”

No, she signed. Amy no go.

“Yes, Amy.” He went to his pack and got his syringe and a bottle of Thoralen.

With her body stiff and angry, she tapped the underside of her chin with a clenched fist.

“Watch your language, Amy,” he warned her.

Ross came over with orange life vests for him and Amy.

“Something wrong?”

“She’s swearing,” Elliot said. “Better leave us alone.” Ross took one look at Amy’s tense, rigid body, and left hurriedly.

Amy signed Peter’s name, then tapped the underside of her chin again. This was the Ameslan sign politely translated in scholarly reports as “dirty,” although it was most often employed by apes when they needed to go to the potty. Primate investigators were under no illusions about what the animals really meant. Amy was saying, Peter shiny.

Nearly all language-skilled primates swore, and they employed a variety of words for swearing. Sometimes the pejorative seemed to be chosen at random, “nut” or “bird”

or “wash.” But at least eight primates in different laboratories had independently settled on the clenched-fist sign to signify extreme displeasure. The only reason this remarkable coincidence hadn’t been written up was that no investigator was willing to try and explain it. It seemed to prove that apes, like people, found bodily excretions suitable terms to express denigration and anger.

Peter shitty. she signed again.

“Amy.. .“ He doubled the Thoralen dose he was drawing into the syringe.

Peter shiny boat shiny people shiny.

“Amy, cut it out.” He stiffened his own body and hunched over, imitating a gorilla’s angry posture; that often made her back off, but this time it had no effect.

Peter no like Amy. Now she was sulking, turned away from him, signing to nobody.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Elliot said, approaching her with the syringe held ready. “Peter like Amy.”

She backed away and would not let him come close to her. In the end he was forced to load the CO2 gun and shoot a dart into her chest. He had only done this three or four times in all their years together. She plucked out the dart with a sad expression. Peter no like Amy.

“Sorry,” Peter Elliot said, and ran forward to catch her as her eyes rolled back and she collapsed into his arms.

Amy lay on her back in the second boat at Elliot’s feet, breathing shallowly. Ahead, Elliot saw Munro standing in the first boat, leading the way as the Zodiacs slid silently downstream.

Munro had divided the expedition into two rafts of six each; Munro went in the first, and Elliot, Ross, and Amy went in the second, under Kahega’s command. As Munro put it, the second boat would “learn from our misfortunes.”

But for the first two hours on the Ragora, there were no misfortunes. It was an extraordinarily peaceful experience to sit in the front of the boat and watch the jungle on both sides of the river glide past them in timeless, hypnotic silence. It was idyllic, and very hot; Ross began to trail her hand over the side in the muddy water, until Kahega put a stop to it.

“Where there is water, there is always mambo,” he said. Kahega pointed to the muddy ‘banks, where crocodiles basked in the sunshine, indifferent to their approach. Occasionally one of the huge reptiles yawned, lifting jagged jaws into the air, but for the most part they seemed sluggish, hardly noticing the boats.

Elliot was secretly disappointed. He had grown up on the jungle movies where the crocodiles slithered menacingly into the water at the first approach of boats. “Aren’t they going to bother us?” he asked.

“Too hot,” Kahega said. “Mambo sleepy except at cool times, eat morning and night, not now. In daytime, Kikuyu say mambo have joined army, one-two-three-four.” And he laughed.

It took some explaining before it was clear that Kahega’s tribesmen had noticed that during the day the crocodiles did pushups, periodically lifting their heavy bodies off the ground on their stubby legs in a movement that reminded Kahega of army calisthenics.

“What is Munro so worried about?” Elliot asked. “The crocodiles?”

“No,” Kahega said.

“The Ragora Gorge?”

“No,” Kahega said.

“Then what?”

“After the gorge,” Kahega said.

Now the Ragora twisted, and they came around a bend, and they heard the growing roar of the water. Elliot felt the boat gathering speed, the water rippling along the rubber gunwales. Kahega shouted, “Hold fast, Doctors!”

And they were into the gorge.

Afterward, Elliot had only fragmented, kaleidoscopic impressions: the churning muddy water that boiled white in the sunlight; the erratic wrenching of his own boat, and the way Munro’s boat up ahead seemed to reel and upend, yet miraculously remain upright.

They were moving so fast it was hard to focus on the passing blur of craggy red canyon walls, bare rock except for sparse green clinging scrub; the hot humid air and the shockingly cold muddy water that smashed over them, drenching them time and again; the pure white surge of water boiling around the black protruding rocks, like the bald heads of drowned men.

Everything was happening too fast.

Ahead, Munro’s boat was often lost from sight for minutes at a time, concealed by giant standing waves of leaping, roaring muddy water. The roar echoed off the rock walls, reverberating, becoming a constant feature of their world; in the depths of the gorge, where the afternoon sun did not reach the narrow strip of dark water, the boats moved through a rushing, churning inferno, careening off rocky walls, spinning end around end, while the boatmen shouted and cursed and fended off the rock walls with paddles.

Amy lay on her back, lashed to the side of the boat, and Elliot was in constant fear that she would drown from the muddy waves that crashed over the gunwales. Not that Ross was doing much better; she kept repeating “Oh my God oh my God oh my God” over and over, in a low monotone, as the water smashed down on them in successive waves, soaking them to the skin.

Other indignities were forced upon them by nature. Even in the boiling, pounding heart of the gorge, black clouds of mosquitoes hung in the air, stinging them again and again. Somehow it did not seem possible that there could be mosquitoes in the midst of the roaring chaos of the Ragora Gorge, but they were there. The boats moved with gut-wrenching fury through the standing waves, and in the growing darkness the passengers baled out the boats and slapped at the mosquitoes with equal intensity.

And then suddenly the river broadened, the muddy water slowed, and the walls of the canyon moved apart. The river became peaceful again. Elliot slumped back in the boat, exhausted, feeling the fading sun on his face and the water moving beneath the inflated rubber of the boat.

“We made it,” he said.

“So far,” Kahega said. “But we Kikuyu say no one escapes from life alive. No relaxing now, Doctors!”

“Somehow,” Ross said wearily, “I believe him.”

They drifted gently downstream for another hour, and the rock walls receded farther away on each side, until finally they were in fiat African rain forest once more. It was as if the Ragora Gorge had never existed; the river was wide and sluggish gold in the descending sun.

Elliot stripped off his soaking shirt and changed it for a pullover, for the evening air was chilly. Amy snored at his feet, covered with a towel so she would not get too cold. Ross checked her transmitting equipment, making sure it was all right. When she was finished, the sun had set and it was rapidly growing dart. Kahega broke out a shotgun and inserted yellow stubby shells.

“What’s that for?” Elliot said.

“Kiboko, “Kahega said. “I do not know the word in English.” He shouted, “Mzee! Nini maana kiboko?"

In the lead boat, Munro glanced back. “Hippopotamus,” he said.

“Hippo,” Kahega said.

“Are they dangerous?” Elliot asked.

“At night, we hope no,” Kahega said. “But me, I think yes."

The twentieth century had been a period of intensive wildlife study, which overturned many tong-standing conceptions about animals. It was now recognized that the gentle, soft-eyed deer actually lived in a ruthless, nasty society, while the supposedly vicious wolf was devoted to family and offspring in exemplary fashion. And the African lion—the proud king of beasts—was relegated to the status of slinking scavenger, while the loathed hyena assumed new dignity. (For decades, observers had come upon a dawn kill to find lions feeding on the carcass, while the scavenging hyenas circled at the periphery, awaiting their chance. Only after scientists began night tracking the animals did a new interpretation emerge: hyenas actually made the kill, only to be driven off by opportunistic and lazy lions; hence the traditional dawn scene. This coincided with the discovery that lions were in many ways erratic and mean, while the hyenas had a finely developed social structure—yet another instance of longstanding human prejudice toward the natural world of animals.)

But the hippopotamus remained a poorly understood animal. Herodotus’s ‘river horse” was the largest African mammal after the elephant, but its habit of lying in the water  with just eyes and nostrils protruding made it difficult to study. Hippos were organized around a male. A mature male had a harem of several females and their offspring, a group of eight to fourteen animals altogether.

Despite their obese, rather humorous appearance, hippos were capable of unusual violence. The bull hippopotamus was a formidable creature, fourteen feet long and weighing nearly ten thousand pounds. Charging, he moved with extraordinary speed for such a large animal, and his four stubby blunted tusks were actually razor sharp on the sides. A hippo attacked by slashing, moving his cavernous mouth from side to side, rather than biting. And, unlike most animals, a fight between bulls often resulted in the death of one animal from deep slashing wounds. There was nothing symbolic about a hippopotamus fight.

The animal was dangerous to man, as well. In river areas where herds were found, half of native deaths were attributed to hippos; elephants and predatory cats accounted for the remainder. The hippopotamus was vegetarian, and at night the animals came onto the land, where they ate enormous quantities of grass to sustain their great bulk. A hippo separated from the water was especially dangerous; anyone finding himself between a landed hippo and the river he was rushing to return to did not generally survive the experience.

But the hippo was essential to Africa’s river ecology. His fecal matter, produced in prodigious quantities, fertilized the river grasses, which in turn allowed river fish and other creatures to live. Without the hippopotamus African rivers would be sterile, and where they had been driven away, the rivers died.

This much was known, and one thing more. The hippopotamus was fiercely territorial. Without exception, the male defended his river against any intruder. And as had been recorded on many occasions, intruders included other hippos, crocodiles, and passing boats. And the people in them.

DAY 7: MUKENKO

June 19, 1979

       1. Kiboko

MUNRO’S INTENTION IN CONTINUING THROUGH the night was two-fold. First, he hoped to make up precious time, for. all the computer projections assumed that they would stop each night. But it took no effort to ride the river in the moonlight; most of the party could sleep, and they would advance themselves another fifty or sixty miles by dawn.

But more important, he hoped to avoid the Ragora hippos, which could easily destroy their flimsy rubber boats. During the day, the hippos were found in pools beside the riverbanks, and the bulls would certainly attack any passing boat. At night, when the animals went ashore to forage, the expedition could slip down the river and avoid a confrontation entirely.

It was a clever plan, but it ran into trouble for an unexpected reason—their progress on the Ragora was too rapid. It was only nine o’clock at night when they reached the first hippo areas, too early for the animals to be eating. The hippos would attack the boats—but they would attack in the dark.

The river twisted and turned in a series of curves. At each curve there was a still pool, which Kahega pointed out as the kind of quiet water that hippos liked to inhabit. And he pointed to the grass on the banks, cut short as if the banks had been mown.

“Soon now,” Kahega said.

They heard a low grunting, “Raw-huh-huh-huh.” It sounded like an old man trying to clear his throat of phlegm. Munro tensed in the lead boat. They drifted around another curve, carried smoothly in the flow of current. The two boats were now about ten yards apart. Munro held his loaded shotgun ready.

The sound came again, this time in a chorus: “Haw-huh-huh-huh.”

Kahega plunged his paddle into the water. It struck bottom quickly. He pulled it out; only three feet of it was wet. “Not deep,” he said, shaking his head.

“Is that bad?” Ross said.

“Yes, I think it is bad.”

They came around the next bend, and Elliot saw a half-dozen partially submerged black rocks near the shore, gleaming in the moonlight. Then one of the “rocks” crashed upward and he saw an enormous creature lift entirely out of the shallow water so that he could see the four stubby legs, and the hippo churned forward toward Munro’s boat.

Munro fired a low magnesium flare as the animal charged; in the harsh white light Elliot saw a gigantic mouth, four huge glistening blunted teeth, the head lifted upward as the animal roared. And then the hippo was engulfed in a cloud of pale yellow gas. The gas drifted back, and stung their eyes.

“He’s using tear gas,” Ross said.

Munro’s boat had already moved on. With a roar of pain the male hippo had plunged down into the water and disappeared from sight. In the second boat, they blinked back tears and watched for him as they approached the pool. Overhead, the magnesium flare sizzled and descended, lengthening sharp shadows, glaring off the water.

“Perhaps he’s given up,” Elliot said. They could not see the hippo anywhere. They drifted in silence.

And suddenly the front of the boat bucked up, and the hippo roared and Ross screamed. Kahega toppled backward, discharging his gun into the air. The boat slapped down with a wrenching crash and a spray of water over the sides, and Elliot scrambled to his feet to check Amy and found himself staring into a huge pink cavernous mouth and hot breath. The mouth came down with a lateral slash on the side of the rubber boat, and the air began to hiss and sizzle in the water.

The mouth opened again, and the hippo grunted, but by then Kahega had got to his feet and flied a stinging cloud of gas. The hippo backed off and splashed down, rocking the boat and propelling them onward, down the river. The whole right side of the boat was collapsing swiftly as the air leaked out of the huge cuts in the rubber. Elliot tried to pull them shut with his hands; the hissing continued unabated. They would sink within a minute.

Behind them, the bull hippo charged, racing down the shallow river like a powerboat, churning water in a wake from both sides of his body, bellowing in anger.

“Hold on, bold on!” Kahega shouted, and fired again. The hippo disappeared behind a cloud of gas, and the boat drifted around another curve. When the gas cleared the animal was gone. The magnesium flare sputtered into the water and they were plunged into darkness again. Elliot grabbed Amy as the boat sank, and they found themselves standing knee-deep in the muddy water.

They managed to beach the Zodiac on the dark riverbank. In the lead boat, Munro paddled over, surveyed the damage, and announced that they would inflate another boat and go on. He called for a rest, and they all lay in the moonlight on the river’s edge swatting mosquitoes away.

Their reverie was interrupted by the screaming whine of ground-to-air rockets, blossoming explosions in the sky overhead. With each explosion, the riverbank glowed bright red, casting long shadows, then fading black once more.

“Muguru’s men firing from the ground,” Munro said, reaching for his field glasses.

“What’re they shooting at?” Elliot said, staring up into the sky.

“Beats me,” Munro said.

Amy touched Munro’s arm, and signed, Bird come. But they heard no sound of an aircraft, only the bursting of rockets in the sky.

Munro said, “You think she hears something?”

“Her hearing is very acute.”

And then they heard the drone of a distant aircraft, approaching from the south. As it came into view, they saw it twist, maneuvering among the brilliant yellow-red explosions that burst in the moonlight and glinted off the metal body of the aircraft.

“Those poor bastards are trying to make time,” Munro said, scanning the plane through field glasses. “That’s a C-130 transport with Japanese markings on the tail. Supply plane for the consortium base camp—if it makes it through.”

As they watched, the transport twisted left and right, running a zigzag course through the bursting fireballs of exploding missiles.

“Breaking a snake’s back,” Munro said. “The crew must be terrified; they didn’t buy into this.”

Elliot felt a sudden sympathy for the crew; he imagined them staring out the windows as the fireballs exploded with brilliant light, illuminating the interior of the plane. Were they chattering in Japanese? Wishing they had never come?

A moment later, the aircraft droned onward to the north, out of sight, a final missile with a red-hot tail chasing after it, but it was gone over the jungle trees, and he listened to the distant explosion of the missile.

“Probably got through,” Munro said, standing. “We’d

better move on.” And he shouted in Swahili for Kahega to put the men on the river once more.

2. Mukenko

ELLIOT SHIVERED, ZIPPED HIS PARKA TIGHTER, AND waited for the hailstorm to stop. They were huddled beneath a stand of evergreen trees above 8,000 feet on the alpine slopes of Mount Mukenko. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and the air temperature was 38 degrees. Five hours before, they had left the river behind and begun their pre-dawn climb in 100-degree steaming jungle.

Alongside him, Amy watched the golf ball-sized white pellets bounce on the grass and slap the branches of the tree over their heads. She had never seen hail before.

She signed, What name?

“Hail,” he told her.

Peter make stop.

“I wish I could, Amy.”

She watched the hail for a moment, then signed, Amy want go home.

She had begun talking about going home the night before. Although the Thoralen had worn off, she remained depressed and withdrawn. Elliot had offered her some food to cheer her up. She signed that she wanted milk. When he told her they -had none (which she knew. perfectly well), she signed that she wanted a banana. Kahega had produced a bunch of small, slightly sour jungle bananas. Amy had eaten them without objection on previous days. but she now threw them into the water contemptuously, signing she wanted “real bananas.”

When Elliot told her that they had no real bananas, she signed, Amy want go home.

“We can’t go home now, Amy.”

Amy good gorilla Peter take Amy home.

She had only known him as the person in charge, the final arbiter of her daily life in the experimental setting of Project Amy. He could think of no way to make clear to her that he was no longer in charge, and ‘that he was not punishing her by keeping her here.

In fact, they were all discouraged. Each of the expedition members had looked forward to escaping the oppressive heat of the rain forest, but now that they were climbing Mukenko, their enthusiasm had quickly faded. “Christ,” Ross said. “From hippos to hail.”

As if on cue, the hail stopped. “All right,” Munro said, “let’s get moving.”

Mukenko had never been climbed until 1933. In 1908, a German party under von Ranke ran into storms and had to descend; a Belgian team in 1913 reached 10,000 feet but could not find a route to the summit; and another German team was forced to quit in 1919 when two team members fell and died, about 12,000 feet. Nevertheless Mukenko was classified as a fairly easy (non-technical) climb by most mountaineers, who generally devoted a day to the ascent; after 1943, a new route up the southeast was found which was frustratingly slow but not dangerous, and it was this mute that most climbers followed.

Above 9,000 feet, the pine forest disappeared and they crossed weak grassy fields cloaked in chilly mist; the air was thinner, and they called frequently for a rest. Munro had no patience with the complaints of his charges. “What did you expect?” he demanded. “It’s a mountain. Mountains are high.” He was especially merciless with Ross, who seemed the most easily fatigued. “What about your timetable?” he would ask her. “We’re not even to the difficult part. It’s not even interesting until eleven thousand feet. You quit now and we’ll never make it to the summit before nightfall, and that means we lose a full day.”

“I don’t care,” Ross said finally, dropping to the ground, gasping for breath.

“Just like a woman,” Munro said scornfully, and smiled when Ross glared at him. Munro humiliated them, chided them, encouraged them—and somehow kept them moving.

Above 10,000 feet, the grass disappeared and there was only mossy ground cover; they came upon the solitary peculiar fat-leafed lobelia trees, emerging suddenly from the cold gray mist. There was no real cover between 10,000 feet and the summit, which was why Munro pushed them; he did not want to get caught in a storm on the barren upper slopes.

The sun broke out at 11,000 feet, and they stopped to position the second of the directional lasers for the ERTS laser-fix system. Ross had already set the first laser several miles to the south that morning, and it had taken thirty minutes.

The second laser was more critical, since it had to be matched to the first. Despite the electronic jamming, the transmitting equipment had to be connected with Houston, in order that the little laser—it was the size of a pencil eraser, mounted on a tiny steel tripod—could be accurately aimed. The two lasers on the volcano were positioned so that their beams crossed many miles away, above the jungle. And if Ross’s calculations were correct, that intersection point was directly over the city of Zinj.

Elliot wondered if they were inadvertently assisting the consortium, but Ross said no. “Only at night,” she said, “when they aren’t moving. During the day, they won’t be able to lock on our beacons—that’s the beauty of the system.”

Soon they smelled sulfurous volcanic fumes drifting down from the summit, now 1,500 feet above them. Up here there was no. vegetation at all, only bare hard rock and scattered patches of snow tinged yellow from the sulfur. The sky was clear dark blue, and they had spectacular views of the south Virunga range—the great cone of Nyiragongo, rising steeply from the deep green of the Congo forests, and, beyond that, Mukenko, shrouded in fog.

The last thousand feet were the most difficult, particularly for Amy, who had to pick her way barefoot among the sharp lava rocks. Above 12,000 feet, the ground was loose volcanic scree. They reached the summit at five in the afternoon, and gazed over the eight-mile-wide lava lake and smoking crater of the volcano. Elliot was disappointed in the landscape of black rock and gray steam clouds. “Wait until night,” Munro said.

That night the lava glowed in a network of hot red through the broken dark crust; hissing red steam slowly lost its color as it rose into the sky. On the crater rim, their little tents reflected the red glow of the lava. lb the west scattered clouds were silver in the moonlight, and beneath them the Congo Jungle stretched away for miles. They could see the straight green laser beams, intersecting over the black forest. With any luck they would reach that intersection tomorrow.

Ross connected her transmitting equipment to make the nightly report to Houston. After the regular six-minute delay, the signal linked directly through to Houston, without interstitial encoding or other evasive techniques.

“Hell,” Munro said.

“But what does it mean?” Elliot asked.

“It means,” Munro said gloomily. “the consortium has stopped jamming us.”

“Isn’t that good?”

“No,” Ross said. “It’s bad. They must already be on the site, and they’ve found the diamonds.” She shook her head, and adjusted the video screen:

HUSTN CONFRMS CONSRTUM ONSITE ZINJ PROBABILITY 1.000. TAK NO FURTHR RSKS. SITUTN HOPELSS.

“I can’t believe it,” Ross said. “It’s all over.”

Elliot sighed. “My feet hurt,” he said.

“I’m tired,” Munro said.

“The hell with it,” Ross said.

Utterly exhausted, they all went to bed.

DAY 8: KANYAMAGUFA

June 20, 1979

  1. Descent

EVERYONE SLEPT LATE ON THE MORNING OF JUNE 20. They had a leisurely breakfast, taking the time to cook a hot meal. They relaxed in the sun, and played with Amy, who was delighted by this unexpected attention. It was past ten o’clock before they started down Mukenko to the jungle.

Because the western slopes of Mukenko are sheer and impassible, they descended inside the smoking volcanic crater to a depth of half a mile. Munro led the way, carrying a porter’s load on his head; Asari, the strongest porter, had to carry Amy, because the rocks were much too hot for her bare feet.

Amy was terrified, and regarded the human persons trekking single-file down the steep inner cone to be mad. Elliot was not sure she was wrong: the heat was intense; as they approached the lava lake, the acrid fumes made eyes water and nostrils burn; they heard the lava pop and crackle beneath the heavy black crust.

Then they reached the formation called Naragema—the Devil’s Eye. It was a natural arch 150 feet high, and so smooth it appeared polished on the inside. Through this arch a fresh breeze blew, and they saw the green jungle below. They paused to rest in the arch, and Ross examined the smooth inner surface. It was part of a lava tube formed in some earlier eruption; the main body of the tube had been blown away, leaving just the slender arch.

“They call it the Devil’s Eye,” Munro said, “because from below, during an eruption, it glows like a red eye.”

From the Devil’s Eye they descended rapidly through an alpine zone, and from there across the unworldly jagged terrain of a recent lava flow. Here they encountered black craters of scorched earth, some as deep as five or six feet. Munro’s first thought was that the Zaire army had used this field for mortar practice. But on closer examination, they saw a scorched pattern etched into the rock, extending like tentacles outward from the craters. Munro had never seen anything like it; Ross immediately set up her antenna, hooked in the computer, and got in touch with Houston. She seemed very excited.

The party rested while she reviewed the data on the little screen; Munro said, “What are you asking them?”

“The date of the last Mukenko eruption, and the local weather. It was in March—Do you know somebody named Seamans?”

“Yes,” Elliot said. "Tom Seamans is the computer programmer for Project Amy. Why?”

“There’s a message for you,” she said, pointing to the screen.

Elliot came around to look: SEMNS MESG FOR ELYT STNDBY.

“What’s the message?” Elliot asked.

“Push the transmit button,” she said.

He pushed the button and the message flashed: REVUWD ORGNL TAPE HUSTNNUN

“I don’t understand,” Elliot said. Ross explained that the “M” meant that there was more message, and he had to press the transmit button again. He pushed the button several times before he got the message, which in its entirety read:

REVUWO ORGNL TAPE HUSTN NU FINDNG RE AURL SIGNL INFO—COMPUTR ANLYSS COMPLTE THNK ITS LNGWGE.

Elliot found he could read the compressed shortline language by speaking it aloud: “Reviewed original tape Houston, new finding regarding aural signal information, computer analysis complete think it’s language.” He frowned. “Language?”

Ross said, “Didn’t you ask him to review Houston’s original tape material from the Congo?”

“Yes, but that was for visual identification of the animal on the screen. I never said anything to him about aural information.” Elliot shook his head. “I wish I could talk to him.”

“You can,” Ross said. “If you don’t mind waking him up.” She pushed the interlock button, and fifteen minutes later Elliot typed, Hello Tom How Are You? The screen printed HLO TOM HOURU.

“We don’t usually waste satellite time with that kind of thing,” Ross said.

The screen printed SLEPY WHRERU.

He typed, Virunga. VIRNGA.

“Travis is going to scream when he sees this transcript,” Ross said. “Do you realize what the transmission costs are?”

But Ross needn’t have worried; the conversation soon became technical:

RECVD MESG AURL INFO PLS XPLN.

AXIDENTL DISKVRY VRY XCITNG-DISCRIMNT FUNXN COMPT ANLSS 99 CONFDNCE LIMTS TAPD AURL INFO {BRETHNG SOUNS} DEMNSTRTS CHRCTRISTX SPECH.

SPSFY CHRCTRISTX.

REPETNG ELMNTS-ARBTRARY PATRN-STRXRAL RLATNSHPS-PROBLY THRFOR SPOKN LNGWGE.

KN U TRNSLTE?

NOT SOFR.

WHT RESN?

COMPUTR HAS INSFSNT INFO IN AURL MESG-WNT NOR DATA-ST WORKNG-MAYB NOR TOMORO-FINGRS X.

RLY THNK GORILA LNGWGE?

YES IF GORILA.

“I’ll be damned,” Elliot said. He ended the satellite transmission, but the final message from Seamans remained on the screen, glowing bright green:

YES IF GORILA.

2. The Hairy Men

WITHIN TWO HOURS OF RECEIVING THIS unexpected news, the expedition had its first contact with gorillas.

They were by now back in the darkness of the equatorial rain forest. They proceeded directly toward the site, following the overhead laser beams. They could not see these beams directly, but Ross had brought a weird optical track guide, a cadmium photocell filtered to record the specific laser wavelength emission. Periodically during the day, she inflated a small helium balloon, attached the track guide with a wire, and released it. Lifted by the helium, the guide rose into the sky above the trees. There it rotated, sighted one of the laser lines, and transmitted coordinates down the wire to the computer. They followed the track of diminishing laser intensity from a single beam, and waited for the “blip reading,” the doubled intensity value that would signal the intersection of two beams above them.

This was a slow job and their patience was wearing thin when, toward midday, they came upon the characteristic three-lobed feces of gorilla, and they saw several nests made of eucalyptus leaves on the ground and in the trees.

Fifteen minutes later, the air was shattered by a deafening roar. “Gorilla,” Munro announced. “That was a male telling somebody off.”

Amy signed, Gorillas say go away.

“We have to continue, Amy,” he said.

Gorilla no want human people come.

“Human people won’t harm gorillas,” Elliot assured her. But Amy just looked blank at this, and shook her head, as if Elliot had missed the point.

Days later he realized that he had indeed missed the point.

Amy was not telling him that the gorillas were afraid of being harmed by people. She was saying that the gorillas were afraid that the people would be harmed, by gorillas.

They had progressed halfway across a small jungle clearing when the large silverback male reared above the foliage and bellowed at them.

Elliot was leading the group, because Munro had gone back to help one of the porters with his pack. He saw six animals at the edge of the clearing, dark black shapes against the green, watching the human intruders. Several of the females cocked their heads and compressed their lips in a kind of disapproval. The dominant male roared again.

He was a large male with silver hair down his back. His massive head stood mote than six feet above the ground, and his barrel chest indicated that he weighed more than four hundred pounds. Seeing him, Elliot understood why the first explorers to the Congo had believed gorillas to be “hairy men,” for this magnificent creature looked like, a gigantic man, both in size and shape.

At Elliot’s back Ross whispered, “What do we do?”

“Stay behind me,” Elliot said, “and don’t move.”

The silverback male dropped to all fours briefly, and began a soft ho-ho-ho sound, which grew more intense as he leapt to his feet again, grabbing handfuls of grass as he did so. He threw the grass in the air, and then beat his chest with flat palms, making a hollow thumping sound.

“Oh, no,” Ross said.

The chest-beating lasted five seconds, and then the male dropped to all fours again. He ran sideways across the grass, slapping the foliage and making as much noise as possible, to frighten the intruders off. Finally he began the ho-ho-ho sound once more.

The male stared at Elliot, expecting that this display would send him running. When it did not, the male leapt to his feet, Pounded his chest, and roared with even greater fury.

And then he charged.

With a howling scream he came crashing forward at frightening speed, directly toward Elliot. Elliot heard Ross gasp behind him. He wanted to turn and run, his every bodily instinct screamed that he should run, but he forced himself to stand absolutely still—and to look down at the ground.

Staring at his feet while he listened to the gorilla crashing through the tall grass toward him, he had the sudden sensation that all his abstract book knowledge was wrong, that everything that scientists around the world thought about gorillas was wrong. He had a mental image of the huge head and the deep chest and the long arms swinging wide as the powerful animal rushed toward an easy kill, a stationary target foolish enough to believe all the academic misinformation sanctified by print.

The gorilla (who must have been quite close) made a snorting noise, and Elliot could see his heavy shadow on. the grass near his feet. But he did not look up until the shadow moved away.

When Elliot raised his head, he saw the male gorilla retreating backward, toward the far edge of the clearing. There the male turned, and scratched his head in a puzzled way, as if wondering why his terrifying: display had not driven off the intruders. He slapped the ground a final time, and then he and the rest of the troop melted away into the tall grass. It was silent in the clearing until Ross collapsed into Elliot’s arms.

“Well,” Munro said as he came up, “it seems you know a thing or two about gorillas after all.” Munro patted Ross’s arm. “It’s all right. They don’t do anything unless you run away. Then they bite you on the ass. That’s the mark for cowardice in these regions—because it means you ran away.”

Ross was sobbing quietly, and Elliot discovered that his own knees were shaky; he went to sit down. It had all happened so fast that it was a few moments before he realized that these gorillas had behaved in exactly the textbook manner, which included not making any verbalizations even remotely like speech.

3. The Consortium

AN HOUR LATER THEY FOUND THE WRECKAGE OF the C-130 transport. The largest airplane in the world appeared in correct scale as it lay half buried in the jungle, the gigantic nose crushed against equally gigantic trees, the enormous tail section twisted toward the ground, the massive wings buckled casting shadows on the jungle floor.

Through the shattered cockpit windshield, they saw the body of the pilot, covered with black flies. The flies buzzed and thumped against the glass as they peered in. Moving aft, they tried to look into the fuselage windows, but even on crumpled landing gear the body of the plane stood too high above the jungle floor.

Kahega managed to climb an overturned tree, and from there moved onto one wing and looked into the interior. “No people,” he said.

“Supplies?”

“Yes, many supplies. Boxes and containers.” Munro left the others, walking beneath the crushed tail section to examine the far side of the plane. The port wing, concealed from their view, was blackened and shattered, the engines gone. That explained why the plane crashed—the last FZA missile had found its target, blowing away most of the port wing. Yet the wreck remained oddly mysterious to Munro; something about its appearance was wrong. He looked along the length of the fuselage, from the crushed nose, down the line of windows, past the stump of wing, past the rear exit doors....

“I’ll be damned,” Munro said softly.

He hurried back to the others, who were sitting on one of the tires, in the shadow of the starboard wing The tire was so enormous that Ross could sit on it and swing her feet in the air without touching the ground.

“Well,” Ross said, with barely concealed satisfaction.

“They didn’t get their damn supplies.”

“No,” Munro said. “And we saw this plane the night before last, which means it’s been down at least thirty-six hours.”

Munro waited for Ross to figure it out.

“Thirty-six hours?”

“That’s right. Thirty-six hours.”

“And they never came back to get their supplies    

“They didn’t even try to get them,” Munro said. “Look at the main cargo doors, fore and aft—no one has tried to open them. I wonder why they never came back?”

In a section of dense jungle, the ground underfoot

crunched and crackled. Pushing aside the palm fronds, they saw a carpeting of shattered white bones.

“Kanyamagufa," Munro said. The place of bones. He glanced quickly at the porters to see what their reaction was, but they showed only puzzlement, no fear. They were East African Kikuyu and they had none of the superstitions of the tribes that bordered the rain forest.

Amy lifted her feet from the sharp bleached fragments. She signed, Ground hurt.

Elliot signed, What place this?

We come bad place.

What bad place?

Amy had no reply.

“These are bones!” Ross said, staring down at the ground.

“That’s right,” Munro said quickly, “but they’re not human bones. Are they, Elliot?”

Elliot was also looking at the ground. He saw bleached skeletal remains from several species, although he could not immediately identify any of them.

“Elliot? Not human?”

“They don’t look human,” Elliot agreed, staring at the ground. The first thing he noticed was that the majority of the bones came from distinctly small animals—birds, monkeys, and tiny forest rodents. Other small pieces were actually fragments from larger animals, but how large was hard to say. Perhaps large monkeys—but there weren’t any large monkeys in the rain forest.

Chimpanzees? There were no chimps in this part of the Congo. Perhaps they might be gorillas: he saw one fragment from a cranium with heavy frontal sinuses, and he saw the beginning of the characteristic sagittal crest.

“Elliot?” Munro said, his voice tense, insistent. “Nonhuman?”

“Definitely non-human,” Elliot said, staring. What could shatter a gorilla skull? It must have happened after death, he decided. A gorilla had died and after many years the bleached skeleton had been crushed in some fashion. Certainly it could not have happened during life.

“Not human,” Munro said, looking at the ground. “Hell of a lot of bones, but nothing human.” As he walked past Elliot, he gave him a look. Keep your mouth shut. “Kahega and his men know that you are expert in these matters,”

Munro said, looking at him steadily.

What had Munro seen? Certainly he had been around enough death to know a human skeleton when he saw one. Elliot’s glance fell on a curved bone. It looked a bit like a turkey wishbone, only much larger and broader, and white with age. He picked it up. It was a fragment of the zygomatic arch from a human skull. A cheekbone, from beneath the eye.

He turned the fragment in his hands. He looked back at the jungle floor, and the creepers that spread reaching tentacles over the white carpet of bones. He saw many very fragile bones,, some so thin they were translucent—bones that he assumed had come from small animals.

Now he was not sure.

A question from graduate school returned to him. What seven bones compose the orbit of the human eye? Elliot tried to remember. The zygoma, the nasal, the inferior orbital, the sphenoid—that was four—the ethmoid, five—something must come from beneath, from the mouth—the palatine, six—one more to go—he couldn’t think of the last bone. Zygoma, nasal, inferior orbital, sphenoid, ethmoid, palatine. . . delicate bones, translucent bones, small bones.

Human bones.

“At least these aren’t human bones,” Ross said.

“No,” Elliot agreed. He glanced at Amy.

Amy signed, People die here.

“What did she say?”

“She said people don’t benefit from the air here.”

“Let’s push on,” Munro said.

Munro led him a little distance ahead of the others. “Well done,” he said. “Have to be careful about the Kikuyu. Don’t want to panic them. What’d your monkey say?”

“She said people died there.”

“That’s more than the others know,” Munro said, nodding grimly. “Although they suspect.”

Behind them, the party walked single-file, nobody talking.

“What the hell happened back there?” Elliot said.

“Lots of bones,” Munro said. “Leopard, colobus, forest rat, maybe a bush baby, human. .

“And gorilla,” Elliot said.

“Yes,” Munro said. “I saw that, too. Gorilla.” He shook his head. “What can kill a gorilla, Professor?”

Elliot had no answer.

The consortium camp lay in ruins, the tents shredded and shattered, the dead bodies covered with dense black clouds of flies. In the humid air, the stench was overpowering, the buzzing of the flies an angry monotonous sound. Everybody except Munro hung back at the edge of the camp.

“No choice,” he said. “We’ve got to know what happened to these—” He went inside the camp itself, stepping over the flattened fence.

As Munro moved inside, the perimeter defenses were set off, emitting a screaming high-frequency signal. Outside the fence, the others cupped their hands over their ears and Amy snorted her displeasure.

Bad noise.

Munro glanced back at them. “Doesn’t bother me,” he said. “That’s what you get for staying outside.” Munro went to one dead body, turning it over with his foot. Then he bent down, swatting away the cloud of buzzing flies, and carefully examined the head.

Ross glanced over at Elliot. He seemed to be in shock, the typical scientist, immobilized by disaster. At his side, Amy covered her ears and winced. But Ross was not immobilized; she took a deep breath and crossed the perimeter. “I have to know what defenses they installed.”

“Pine,” Elliot said. He felt detached, light-headed, as if he might faint; the sight and the smells made him dizzy. He saw Ross pick her way across the compound, then lift up a black box with an odd baffled cone. She traced a wire back toward the center of the camp. Soon afterward the high-frequency signal ceased; she had turned it off at the source.

Amy signed, Better now.

With one hand, Ross rummaged through the electronics equipment in the center of the units in the camp, while with the other she held her nose against the stench.

Kahega said, “I’ll see if they have guns, Doctor,” and he, too, moved into the camp. Hesitantly, the other porters followed him.

Alone, Elliot remained with Amy. She impassively surveyed the destruction, although she reached up and took his hand. He signed, Amy what happened this place?

Amy signed, Things come.

What things?

Bad things.

What things?

Bad things come things come bad.

What things?

Bad things.

Obviously he would get nowhere with this line of questioning. He told her to remain outside the camp, and went in himself, moving among the bodies and the buzzing flies.

Ross said, “Anybody find the leader?”

Across the camp, Munro said, “Menard.”

“Out of Kinshasa?”

Munro nodded. “Yeah.”

“Who’s Menard?” Elliot asked.

“He’s got a good reputation, knows the Congo.” Ross picked her way through the debris. “But he wasn’t good enough.” A moment later she paused.

Elliot went over to her. She stared at a body lying face down on the ground.

“Don’t turn it over,” she said. “It’s Richter.” Elliot did not understand how she could be sure. The body was covered with black flies. He bent over.

“Don’t touch him!”

“Okay,” Elliot said.

“Kahega,” Munro shouted, raising a green plastic twenty-liter can. The can sloshed with liquid in his hand. “Let’s get this done.”

Kahega and his men moved swiftly, splashing kerosene over the tents and dead bodies. Elliot smelled the sharp odor.

Ross, crouched under a torn nylon supply tent, shouted, “Give me a minute!”

“Take all the time you want,” Munro said. He turned to Elliot, who was watching Amy outside the camp.

Amy was signing to herself: People bad. No believe people bad things come.

“She seems very calm about it,” Munro said.

“Not really,” Elliot said. “I think she knows what took place here.”

“I ‘hope she’ll tell us,” Munro said. “Because all these men died in the same way. Their skulls were crushed.”

The flames from the consortium camp licked upward into the air, and the black smoke bellowed as the expedition moved onward through the jungle. Ross was silent, lost in thought. Elliot said, “What did you find?”

“Nothing good,” she said. “They had a perfectly adequate peripheral system, quite similar to our ADP—animal defense perimeter. Those cones I found are audio-sensing units, and when they pick up a signal, they emit an ultrahigh-frequency signal that is very painful to auditory systems. Doesn’t work for reptiles, but it’s damn effective on mammalian systems. Send-a wolf or a leopard running for the hills.”

“But it didn’t work here,” Elliot said.

“No,” Ross said. “And it didn’t bother Amy very much.” Elliot said, “What does it do to human auditory systems?”

“You felt it. It’s annoying, but that’s all.” She glanced at Elliot. “But there aren’t any human beings in this part of the Congo. Except us.”

Munro asked, “Can we make a better perimeter defense?”

“Damn right we can,” Ross said. “I’ll give you the next generation perimeter—it’ll stop anything except elephants and rhinos.” But she didn’t sound convinced.

Late in the afternoon, they came upon the remains of the first ERTS Congo camp. They nearly missed it, for during the intervening eight days the jungle vines and creepers had already begun to grow back over it, obliterating all traces. There was not much left—a few shreds of orange nylon, a dented aluminum cooking pan, the crushed tripod, and the broken video camera, its green circuit boards scattered across the ground. They found no bodies, and since the light was fading they pressed on.

Amy was distinctly agitated, She signed, No go.

Peter Elliot paid no attention.

Bad place old place no go.

“We go, Amy,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later they came to a break in the overhanging trees. Looking up, they saw the dark cone of Mukenko rising above the forest, and the faint crossed green beams of the lasers glinting in the humid air. And directly beneath the beams were the moss-covered stone blocks, half concealed in jungle foliage, of the Lost City of Zinj.

Elliot turned to look at Amy.

Amy was gone.

  4. WEIRD

HE COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.

At first he thought she was just punishing him, running off to make him sorry for shooting the dart at her on the river. He explained to Munro and Ross that she was capable of such things, and they spent the next half hour wandering through the jungle, calling her name. But there was no response, just the eternal silence of the rain forest. The half hour became an hour, then almost two hours.

Elliot was panic-stricken.

When she still did not emerge from the foliage, another possibility had to be considered. “Maybe she ran off with the last group of gorillas,” Munro said.

“Impossible,” Elliot said.

“She’s seven, she’s near maturity.” Munro shrugged.

“She is a gorilla.”               -

“Impossible,” Elliot insisted.

But he knew what Munro was saying. Inevitably, people who raised apes found at a certain point they could no longer keep them. With maturity the animals became too large, too powerful, too much their own species to be controllable. It was no longer possible to put them in diapers and pretend they were cute humanlike creatures. Their genes coded inevitable differences that ultimately became impossible to overlook.

“Gorilla troops aren’t closed,” Munro reminded him. “They accept strangers, particularly female strangers.”

“She wouldn’t do that,” Elliot insisted. “She couldn’t.”

Amy had been raised from infancy among human beings. She was much more familiar with the Westernized world of freeways and drive-ins than she was with the jungle. If Elliot drove his car past her favorite drive-in, she was quick to tap his shoulder and point out his error. What did she know of the jungle? It was as alien to her as it was to Elliot himself. And not only that— “We’d better make camp,” Ross said, glancing at her watch. “She’ll come back—if she wants to. After all,” she said, “we didn’t leave her. She left us.”

They had brought a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne but nobody was in a mood to celebrate. Elliot was remorseful over the loss of Amy; the others were horrified by what they had seen of the earlier camp; with night rapidly falling, there was much to do to setup the ERTS system known as WEIRD (Wilderness Environmental Intruder Response Defenses).

The exotic WEIRD technology recognized the fact that perimeter defenses were traditional throughout the history of Congo exploration. More than a century before, Stanley observed that “no camp is to be considered complete until it is fenced around by bush or trees.” In the years since there was little reason to alter the essential nature of that instruction.

But defensive technology had changed, and the WEIRD system incorporated all the latest innovations.

Kahega and his men inflated the silvered Mylar tents, arranging them close together. Ross directed the placement of the tubular infrared night lights on telescoping tripods. These were positioned shining outward around the camp.

Next the perimeter fence was installed. This was a lightweight metalloid mesh, more like cloth than wire. Attached to stakes, it completely enclosed the campsite, and when hooked to the transformer carried 10,000 volts of electrical current. To reduce drain on the fuel cells, the current was pulsed at four cycles a second, creating a throbbing, intermittent hum.

Dinner on the night of June 20 was rice with rehydrated Creole shrimp sauce. The shrimps did not rehydrate well, remaining little cardboard-tasting chunks in the mix, but nobody complained about this failure of twentieth-century technology as they glanced around them at the deepening jungle darkness.

Munro positioned the sentries. They would stand -four-hour watches; Munro announced that he, Kahega, and Elliot would take the first watch.

With night goggles in place, the sentries looked like mysterious grasshoppers peering out at the jungle. The night goggles intensified ambient light and overlaid this on the preexisting imagery, rimming it in ghostly green. Elliot found the goggles heavy, and the electronic view through them difficult to adjust to. He pulled them off after several minutes, and was astonished to see that the jungle was inky black around him. He put them back on hastily.

The night passed quietly, without incident.

DAY 9: ZINJ

June 21, 1979

1. Tiger Tail

THEIR ENTRANCE INTO THE LOST CITY OF ZINJ ON the morning of June 21 was accomplished with none of the mystery and romance of nineteenth-century accounts of similar journeys. These twentieth-century explorers sweated and grunted under a burdensome load of technical equipment— optical range finders, data-lock compasses, RF directionals with attached transmitters, and microwave transponders—all deemed essential to the modem high-speed evaluation of a ruined archaeological site.

They were only interested in diamonds. Schliemann had been only interested in gold when he excavated Troy, and he had devoted three years to it. Ross expected to find her diamonds in three days.

According to the ERTS computer simulation the best way to do this was to draw up a ground plan of the city. With a plan in hand, it would be relatively simple to deduce mine locations from the arrangement of urban structures.

They expected a usable plan of the city within six hours. Using RF transponders, they had only to stand in each of the four corners of a building, pressing the radio beeper at each corner. Back in camp, two widely spaced receivers recorded their signals so that their computer could plot them in two dimensions. But the ruins were extensive, covering more than three square kilometers. A radio survey would separate them widely in dense foliage—and, considering what had happened to the previous expedition, this seemed unwise.

Their alternative was what ERTS called the non-systematic Survey, or “the tiger-tail approach.” (It was a joke at ERTS that one way to find a tiger was to keep walking until you stepped on its tail.) They moved through the ruined buildings, avoiding slithering snakes and giant spiders that scurried into dark recesses. The spiders were the size of a man’s hand, and to Ross’s astonishment made a loud clicking noise.

They noticed that the stonework was of excellent quality, although the limestone in many places was pitted and crumbling. And everywhere they saw the half-moon curve of doors and windows, which seemed to be a cultural design motif.

But aside from that curved shape, they found almost nothing distinctive about the rooms they passed through. In general, the rooms were rectangular and roughly the same size; the walls were bare, lacking decoration. After so many intervening centuries they found no artifacts at all—although Elliot finally came upon a pair of disc-shaped stone paddles, which they presumed had been used to grind spices or grain.

The bland, characterless quality of the city grew more disturbing as they continued; it was also inconvenient, since they had no way to refer to one place or another; they began assigning arbitrary names to different buildings. When Karen Ross found a series of cubby holes carved into the wall of one room, she announced that this must be a post office, and from then on it was referred to as “the post office.”

They came upon a row of small rooms with postholes for wooden bars. Munro thought these were cells of a jail, but the cells were extremely small. Ross said that perhaps the people were small, or perhaps the cells were intentionally small for punishment. Elliot thought perhaps they were cages for a zoo. But in that case, why were all the cages of the same size? And Munro pointed out there was no provision for viewing the animals; he repeated his conviction that it was a jail, and the rooms became known as “the jail.”

Near to. the jail they found an open court they called “the gymnasium.” It was apparently an athletic field or training ground. There were four tall stone stakes with a crumbling stone ring at the top; evidently these had been used for some kind of game like tetherball. In a corner of the court stood a horizontal overhead bar, like a jungle gym, no more than five feet off the ground. The low bar led Elliot to conclude that this was a playground for children. Ross repeated her belief that the people were small. Munro wondered if the gymnasium was a training area for soldiers.

As they continued their search, they were all aware that their reactions simply mirrored their preoccupations. The city was so neutral, so uninformative, that it became a kind of Rorschach for them. What they needed was objective information about the people who had built the city, and their life.

It was there all along, although they were slow to realize it. In many rooms, one wall or another was overgrown with black-green mold. Munro noticed that this mold did not grow in relation to light from a window, or air currents, or any other factor they could identify. In some rooms, the mold grew thickly halfway down a wall, only to stop in a sharp horizontal line, as if cut by a knife.

“Damn strange,” Munro said, peering at the mold, rubbing his finger against it. His finger came away with traces of blue paint.

That was how they discovered the elaborate bas-reliefs, once painted, that appeared throughout the city. However, the overgrowth of mold on the irregular carved surface and the pitting of the limestone made any interpretation of the images impossible.

At lunch, Munro mentioned that it was too bad they hadn’t brought along a group of art historians to recover the bas-relief images. “With all their lights and machines, they could see what’s there in no time,” he said.

The most recent examination techniques for artwork, as devised by Degusto and others, employed infrared light and image intensification, and the Congo expedition had the necessary equipment to contrive such a method on the spot. At least it was worth a try. After lunch they returned to the ruins, lugging in the video camera, one of the infrared night lights, and the tiny computer display screen.

After an hour of fiddling they had worked out a system. By shining infrared light on the walls and recording the image with the video camera—and then feeding that image via Satellite through the digitizing computer programs in Houston, and returning it back to their portable display unit—they were able to reconstitute the pictures on the walls.

Seeing the bas-reliefs in this way reminded Peter Elliot of the night goggles. If you looked directly at the walls, you saw nothing but dark moss and lichen and pitted stone. But if you looked at the little computer screen, you saw the original painted scenes, vibrant and lifelike. It was, he remembered, “very peculiar. There we were in the middle of the jungle, but we could only examine our environment indirectly, with the machines. We used goggles to see at night, arid video to see during the day. We were using machines to see what we could not see otherwise, and we were totally dependent on them.”

He also found it odd that the information recorded by the video camera had to travel more than twenty thousand miles before returning to the display screen, only a few feet away. It was, he said later, the “world’s longest spinal cord,” and it produced an odd effect. Even at the speed of light, the transmission required a tenth of a second, and since there was a short processing time in the Houston computer, the images did not appear on the screen instantaneously, but arrived about half a second late. The delay was just barely noticeable. The scenes they saw provided them with their first insight into the city and its inhabitants.

The people of Zinj were relatively tall blacks, with round beads and muscular bodies; in appearance they resembled the Bantu-speaking people who had first entered the Congo from the highland savannahs to the north, two thousand years ago. They were depicted here as lively and energetic: despite the climate, they favored elaborately decorated, colorful long robes; their attitudes and gestures were expansive; in all ways they contrasted sharply with the bland and crumbling structures, now all that remained of their civilization.

The first decoded frescoes showed marketplace scenes: sellers squatted on the ground beside beautiful woven baskets containing round objects, while buyers stood and bargained with them. At first they thought the round objects were fruit, but Ross decided they were stones.

“Those are uncut diamonds in a surrounding matrix,” she said, staring at the screen. “They’re selling diamonds.”

The frescoes led them to consider what had happened to the inhabitants of the city of Zinj, for the city was clearly abandoned, not destroyed—there was no sign of war or invaders, no evidence of any cataclysm or natural disaster.

Ross, voicing her deepest fears, suspected the diamond mines had given out, turning this city into a ghost town like so many other mining settlements in history. Elliot thought that a plague or disease had overcome the inhabitants. Munro said he thought the gorillas were responsible.

“Don’t laugh,” he said. “This is a volcanic area. Eruptions, earthquakes, drought, fires on the savannah—the animals go berserk, and don’t behave in the ordinary way at all.”

“Nature on the rampage?” Elliot asked, shaking his head. “There are volcanic eruptions here every few years, and we know this city existed for centuries. It can’t be that.”

“Maybe there was a palace revolution, a coup.”

“What would that matter to gorillas?” Elliot laughed.

“It happens,” Munro said. “In Africa, the animals always get strange when there’s a war on, you know.” He then told them stories of baboons attacking farmhouses in South Africa and buses in Ethiopia.

Elliot was unimpressed. These ideas of nature mirroring the affairs of man were very old—at least as old as Aesop, and about as scientific. “The natural world is indifferent to man,” he said.

“Oh, no question,” Munro said, “but there isn’t much natural world left.”

Elliot was reluctant to agree with Munro, but. in fact a well-known academic thesis argued just that. In 1955, the French anthropologist Maurice Cavalle published a controversial paper entitled “The Death of Nature.” In it he said:

One million years ago the earth was characterized by a pervasive wilderness which we may call “nature.” In the midst of this wild nature stood small enclaves of human habitation. Whether caves with artificial fire to keep men warm, or later cities with dwellings and artificial fields of cultivation, these enclaves were distinctly unnatural. In the succeeding millennia, the area of untouched nature surrounding artificial human enclaves progressively declined, although for centuries the trend remained invisible.

Even 300 years ago in France or England, the great cities of man were isolated by hectares of wilderness in which untamed beasts roamed, as they had for thousands of years before. And yet the expansion of man continued inexorably.

One hundred years ago, in the last days of the great European explorers, nature had so radically diminished that it was a novelty: it is for this reason that African explorations captured the imagination of nineteenth-century man. lb enter a truly natural world was exotic, beyond the experience of most mankind, who lived from birth to death in entirely man-made circumstances.

In the twentieth century the balance has shifted so far that for all practical purposes one may say that nature has disappeared. Wild plants are preserved in hothouses, wild animals in zoos and game parks: artificial settings created by man as a souvenir of the once-prevalent natural world. But an animal in a zoo or a game park does not live its natural life, any more than a man in a city lives a natural life.

Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.

Ross called Elliot away from his dinner. “It’s for you,” she said, pointing to the computer next to the antenna. “That friend of yours again.”

Munro grinned, “Even in the jungle, the phone never stops ringing.”

Elliot went over to look at the screen: COMPUTR LNGWAGE ANALYSS NG REQUIR MOR INPUT KN PROVIDE?

WHT INPUT? Elliot typed back.

NOR AURL INPUT-TRNSMIT RECORDNGS.

Elliot typed back, Yes lf Occurs. YES IF OCRS.

RCORD FREQNCY 22—50,000 CYCLS—CRITICL

Elliot typed back, Understood. UNDRSTOD.

There was a pause, then the screen printed:    HOWS AMY?

Elliot hesitated. FINE.

STAF SNOS LOV came the reply, and the transmission was momentarily interrupted.

HOLD TRSNMSN.

There was a long pause.

INCREDIBL NWZ, Seamans printed. HAV FOUND MRS SWENSN

2. Swensn NWZ

FOR A MOMENT ELLIOT DID NOT RECOGNIZE THE name. Swensn? Who was Swensn? A transmission error? And then he realized: Mrs. Swenson! Amy’s discoverer, the woman who had brought her from Africa and had donated her to the Minneapolis zoo. The woman who had been in Borneo all these weeks. IF WE HAD ONLY KNON AMY MOTHR NOT KILD BY NATIVS.

Elliot waited impatiently for the next message from Seamans.

Elliot stared at the message. He had always been told that Amy’s mother had been killed by natives in a village called Bagimindi. The mother had been killed for food, and Amy was orphaned. . .

WHT MEANS?

MOTHR ALREDY DED NOT EATN.

The natives hadn’t killed Amy’s moth& She was already dead?

XPLN.

SWENSN HAS PICTR CAN TRAMSMT?

Hastily, Elliot typed, his fingers fumbling at the keyboard.

TRANSMT.

There was a pause that seemed interminable, and then the video screen received the transmission, scanning it from top to bottom. Long before the picture filled the screen, Elliot realized what it showed.

A crude snapshot of a gorilla corpse with a crushed skull. The animal lay on its back in a packed-earth clearing, presumably in a native village.

In that moment Elliot felt as if the puzzle that preoccupied him, that had caused so much anguish for so many months, was explained. If only they had been able to reach her before...

The glowing electronic image faded to black.

Elliot was confronted by a rush of sudden questions. Crushed skulls occurred in the remote—and supposedly uninhabited—region of the Congo, kanyamagufa, the place of bones. But Bagimindi was a trading village on the Lubula River, more than a hundred miles away. How had Amy and her dead mother reached Bagimindi?

Ross said, “Got a problem?”

“I don’t understand the sequence. I need to ask—”

“Before you do,” she said, “review the transmission. It’s all in memory.” She pressed a button marked REPEAT.

The earlier transmitted conversation was repeated on the screen. As Elliot watched Seaman’s answers, one line struck him: MOTHR ALREDY DED NOT EATN.

Why wasn’t the mother eaten? Gorilla meat was an acceptable—indeed a prized—food in this part of the Congo basin. He typed in a question:

WHY MOTHR NOT EATN.

MOTHR / INFNT FWND BY NATIV ARMY PATRL DOWN FRM SUDAN CARRIED CRPSE / INFNT 5 DAYS TO BAG-MINDI VILLAG FOR SALE TOURISTS. SWENSN THERE.

Five days! Quickly, Elliot typed the important question:

WHER FWNO?

The answer came back: UNKNWN AREA CONGO.

SPECFY.

NO DETALS. A short pause, then: THERS MOR PICTRS.

SND, he typed back.

The screen went blank, and then filled once more, from top to bottom. Now he saw a closer view of the female gorilla’s crushed skull. And alongside the huge skull, a small black creature lying on the ground, hands and feet clenched, mouth open in a frozen scream.

Amy.

Ross repeated the transmission several times, finishing on the image of Amy as an infant—small, black, screaming.

“No wonder she’s been having nightmares,” Ross said. “She probably saw her mother killed.”

Elliot said, “Well, at least we can be sure it wasn’t gorillas. They don’t kill each other.”

“Right now,” Ross said, “we can’t be sure of anything at all.,,

The night of June 21 was so quiet that by ten o’clock they switched off the infrared night lights to save power. Almost at once they became aware of movement in the foliage outside the compound. Munro and Kahega swung their guns around. The rustling increased, and they heard an odd sighing sound, a sort of wheeze.

Elliot heard it too, and felt a chill: it was the same wheezing that had been recorded on the tapes from the first Congo expedition. He turned on the tape recorder, and swung the microphone around. They were all tense, alert, waiting.

But for the next hour nothing further happened. The foliage moved all around them, but they saw nothing. Then shortly before midnight the electrified perimeter fence erupted in sparks. Munro swung his gun around and fired; Ross hit the switch for the night lights and the camp was bathed in deep red.

“Did you see it?” Munro said. “Did you see what it was?”

They shook their heads. Nobody had seen anything. Elliot checked his tapes; he had only the harsh rattle of gunfire, and the sounds of sparks. No breathing.

The rest of the night passed uneventfully.

DAY 10: ZINJ

June 22, 1979

1. Return

THE MORNING OF JUNE 22 WAS FOGGY AND GRAY. Peter Elliot awoke at 6 A.M. to find the camp already up and active. Munro was stalking around the perimeter of the camp, his clothing soaked to the chest by the wet foliage. He greeted Elliot with a look of triumph, and pointed to the ground.

There, on the ground, were fresh footprints. They were deep and short, rather triangular-shaped, and there was a wide space between the big toe and the other four toes—as wide as the space between a human thumb and fingers.

“Definitely not human,” Elliot said, bending to look closely.

Munro said nothing.

“Some kind of primate.”

Munro said nothing.

“It can’t be a gorilla,” Elliot finished, straightening. His video communications from the night before had hardened his belief that gorillas were not involved. Gorillas did not kill other gorillas as Amy’s mother had been killed. “It can’t be a gorilla,” he repeated.

“It’s a gorilla, all right,” Munro said. “Have a look at this.” He pointed to another area of the soft earth. There were four indentations in a row. “Those are the knuckles, when they walk on their hands.”

“But gorillas,” Elliot said, “are shy animals that sleep at night and avoid contact with men.”

“Tell the one that made this print.”

“It’s small for a gorilla,” Elliot said. He examined the fence nearby, where the electrical short had occurred the night before. Bits of gray fur clung to the fence. “And gorillas don’t have gray fur.”

“Males do,” Munro said. “Silverbacks.”

“Yes, but the silverback coloring is whiter than this. This fur is distinctly gray.” He hesitated. “Maybe it’s a kakundakari.”

Munro looked disgusted.

The kakunidakari was a disputed primate in the Congo. Like the yeti of the Himalayas and bigfoot of North America, he had been sighted but never captured. There were endless native stories of a six-foot-tall hairy ape that walked on his hind legs and otherwise behaved in a manlike fashion.

Many respected scientists believed the kakundakari existed; perhaps they remembered the authorities who had once denied the existence of the gorilla.

In 1774, Lord Monboddo wrote of the gorilla that “this wonderful and frightful production of nature walks upright like man; is from 7 to 9 feet high. . . and amazingly strong; covered with longish hair, jet black over the body, but longer on the head; the face more like the human than the Chimpenza, but the complexion black; and has no tail.”

Forty years later, Bowditch described an African ape “generally five feet high, and four across the shoulders; its paw was said to be even more disproportionate than its breadth, and one blow of it to be fetal.” But it was not until 1847 that Thomas Savage, an African missionary, and Jeffries Wyman, a Boston anatomist, published a paper describing “a second species in Africa . . . not recognized by naturalists,” which they proposed to call Troglodytes gorilla. Their announcement caused enormous excitement in the scientific world, and a rush in London, Paris, and Boston to procure skeletons; by 1855, there was no longer any doubt— a second, very large ape existed in Africa.

Even in the twentieth century, new animal species were discovered in the rain forest: the blue pig in 1944, and the red-breasted grouse in 1961. It was perfectly possible that a rare, reclusive primate might exist in the jungle depths. But there was still no hard evidence for the kakundakari.

“This print is from a gorilla,” Munro insisted. “Or rather a group of gorillas. They’re all around the perimeter fence. They’ve been scouting our camp.”

“Scouting our camp,” Elliot repeated, shaking his head.

“That’s right,” Munro said. “Just look at the bloody prints.”

Elliot felt his patience growing short. He said something about white-hunter campfire tales, to which Munro said something unflattering about people who knew everything from books.

At that point, the colobus monkeys in the trees overhead began to shriek and shake the branches.

They found Malawi’s body just outside the compound. The porter had been going to the stream to get water when he had been killed; the collapsible buckets lay on the ground nearby. The bones of his skull had been crushed; the purple, swelling face was distorted, the mouth open.

The group was repelled by the manner of death; Ross turned away, nauseated; the porters huddled with Kahega, who tried to reassure them; Munro bent to examine the injury. “You notice these flattened areas of compression, as if the head was squeezed between something    

Munro then called for the stone paddles that Elliot had found in the city the day before. He glanced back at Kahega.

Kahega stood at his most erect and said, “We go home now, boss.”

“That’s not possible,” Munro said.

“We go home. We must go home, one of our brothers is dead, we must make ceremony for his wife and his children, boss.”

“Kahega. .

“Boss, we must go now.”

“Kahega, we will talk.” Munro straightened, put his arm over Kahega and led him some distance away, across the clearing. They talked in low voices for several minutes.

“It’s awful,” Ross said. She seemed genuinely affected with human feeling and instinctively Elliot turned to comfort her, but she continued, “The whole expedition is falling apart. Ifs awful. We have to hold it together somehow, or we’ll never find the diamonds.”

“Is that all you care about?”

“Well, they do have insurance. . .

“For Christ’s sake,” Elliot said.

“You’re just upset because you’ve lost your damned monkey,” Ross said. “Now get hold of yourself. They’re watching us.”

The Kikuyu were indeed watching Ross and Elliot, trying to sense the drift of sentiment. But they all knew that the real negotiations were between Munro and Kahega, standing off to one side. Several minutes later Kahega returned, wiping his eyes. He spoke quickly to his remaining brothers, and they nodded. He turned back to Munro.

“We stay, boss.”

“Good,” Munro said, immediately resuming his former imperious tone. “Bring the paddles.”

When they were brought, Munro placed the paddles to either side of Malawi’s head. They fitted the semicircular indentations on the head perfectly.

Munro then said something quickly to Kahega in Swahili, and Kahega said something to his brothers, and they nodded. Only then did Munro take the next horrible step. He raised his arms wide, and then swung the paddles back hard against the already crushed skull. The dull sound was sickening; droplets of blood spattered over his shirt, but he did not further damage the skull.

“A man hasn’t the strength to do this,” Munro said flatly. He looked up at Peter Elliot. “Care to try?”

Elliot shook his head.

Munro stood. “Judging by the way he fell, Malawi was standing when it happened.” Munro faced Elliot, looking him in the eye. “Large animal, the size of a man. Large, strong animal. A gorilla.”

Elliot had no reply.

There is no doubt that Peter Elliot felt a personal threat in these developments, although not a threat to his safety. “I simply couldn’t accept it,” he said later. “I knew my field, and I simply couldn’t accept the idea of some unknown, radically violent behavior displayed by gorillas in the wild. And in any case, it didn’t make sense. Gorillas making stone paddles that they used to crush human skulls? It was impossible.”

After examining the body, Elliot went to the stream to wash the blood from his hands. Once alone, away from the others, he found himself staring into the clear running water and considering the possibility that he might be wrong. Certainly primate researchers had a long history of misjudging their subjects.

Elliot himself had helped eradicate one of the most famous misconceptions—the brutish stupidity of the gorilla. In their first descriptions, Savage and Wyman had written, “This animal exhibits a degree of intelligence inferior to that of the Chimpanzee; this might be expected from its wider departure from the organization of the human subject.” Later observers saw the gorilla as “savage, morose, and brutal.” But now there was abundant evidence from field and laboratory studies that the gorilla was in many ways brighter than the chimpanzee.

Then, too, there were the famous stories of chimpanzees kidnapping and eating human infants. For decades, primate researchers had dismissed such native tales as “wild and superstitious fantasy.” But there was no longer any doubt that chimpanzees occasionally kidnapped—and ate—human infants; when Jane Goodall studied Gombe chimpanzees, she locked away her own infant to prevent his being taken and killed by the chimps.

Chimpanzees hunted a variety of animals, according to a complicated ritual. And field studies by Dian Fossey suggested that gorillas also hunted from time to time, killing small game and monkeys, whenever— He heard a rustling in the bushes across the stream, and an enormous silverback male gorilla reared up in chest-high foliage. Peter was startled, although as soon as he got over his fright he realized that he was safe. Gorillas never crossed open water, even a small stream. Or was that a misconception, too?

The male stared at him across the water. There seemed to be no threat in his gaze, just a kind of watchful curiosity. Elliot smelled the musty odor of the gorilla, and he heard the breath hiss through his flattened nostrils. He was wondering what he should do when suddenly the gorilla crashed noisily away through the underbrush, and was gone.

This encounter perplexed him, and he stood, wiping the sweat from his face. Then he realized that there was still movement in the foliage across the stream. After a moment, another gorilla rose up, this one smaller: a female, he thought, though he couldn’t be sure. The new gorilla gazed at him as implacably as the first. Then the hand moved.

Peter come give tickle.

“Amy!” he shouted, and a moment later he had splashed across the stream, and she had leapt into his arms, hugging him and delivering sloppy wet kisses and grunting happily.

Amy’s unexpected return to camp nearly got her shot by the jumpy Kikuyu porters. Only by blocking her body with his own did Elliot prevent gunfire. Twenty minutes later, however, everyone had adjusted to her presence—and Amy promptly began making demands.

She was unhappy to learn that they had not acquired milk or cookies in her absence, but when Munro produced the bottle of warm Dom Perignon, she agreed to accept champagne instead.

They all sat around her, drinking champagne from tin cups. Elliot was glad for the mitigating presence of the others, for now that Amy was sitting there, safely restored to him, calmly sipping her champagne and signing Tickle drink Amy like, he found himself overcome with anger toward her.

Munro grinned at Elliot as he gave him his champagne. “Calmly, Professor, calmly. She’s just a child.”

“The hell she is,” Elliot said. He conducted the subsequent conversation entirely in sign language, not speaking.

Amy, he signed. Why Amy leave?

She buried her nose in her cup, singing Tickle drink good drink.

Amy, he signed. Amy tell Peter why leave.

Peter not like Amy.

Peter like Amy.

Peter hurt Amy Peter fly ouch pin Amy no like Peter no like Amy Amy sad sad.

In a detached corner of his mind, he thought he would have to remember that “ouch pin” had now been extended to the Thoralen dart. Her generalization pleased him, but he signed sternly, Peter like Amy. Amy know Peter like Amy. Amy tell Peter why— Peter no tickle Amy Peter not nice Amy Peter not nice human person Peter like woman no like Amy Peter not like Amy Amy sad Amy sad.

This increasingly rapid signing was itself an indication that she was upset. Where Amy go?

Amy go gorillas good gorillas. Amy like.

Curiosity overcame his anger. Had she joined a troop of wild gorillas for several days? If so, it was an event of major importance, a crucial moment in modern primate history— a language-skilled primate had joined a wild troop and had come back again. He wanted to know more.

Gorillas nice to Amy?

With a smug look: Yes.

Amy tell Peter.

She stared off into the distance, not answering.

To catch her attention Elliot snapped his fingers. She turned to him slowly, her expression bored.

Amy tell Peter, Amy stay gorillas?

Yes.

In her indifference was the clear recognition that Elliot was desperate to learn what she knew. Amy was always very astute at recognizing when she had the upper hand—and she had it now.

Amy tell Peter, he signed as calmly as he could.

Good gorillas like Amy Amy good gorilla.

That told him nothing at all. She was composing phrases by rote: another way of ignoring him.

Amy.

She glanced at him.

Amy tell Peter. Amy come see gorillas?

Yes.

Gorillas do what?

Gorillas sniff Amy.

All gorillas?

Big gorillas white back gorillas sniff Amy baby sniff Amy all gorillas sniff gorillas like Amy.

So silverback males had sniffed her, then infants, then all the members of the troop. That much was clear—remarkably clear, he thought, making a mental note of her extended syntax. Afterward had she been accepted in the troop? He signed, What happen Amy then?

Gorillas give food.

What food?

No name Amy food give food.

Apparently they had shown her food. Or had they actually fed her? Such a thing had never been reported in the wild, but then no one had ever witnessed the introduction of a new animal into a troop. She was a female, and nearly of productive age.

What gorillas give food?

All give food Amy take food Amy like.

Apparently it was not males, or males exclusively. But what had caused her acceptance? Granted that gorilla troops were not as closed to outsiders as monkey troops—what actually had happened?

Amy stay with gorillas?

Gorillas like Amy.

Yes. What Amy do?

Amy sleep Amy eat Amy live gorillas gorillas good gorillas Amy like.

So she had joined in the life of the troop, living the daily existence. Had she been totally accepted?

Amy like gorillas?

Gorillas dumb.

Why dumb?

Gorillas no talk.

No talk sign talk?

Gorillas no talk.

Evidently she had experienced frustration with the gorillas because they did not know her sign language. (Language using primates were commonly frustrated and annoyed when thrown among animals who did not understand the signs.)

Gorillas nice to Amy?

Gorillas like Amy Amy like gorillas like Amy like gorillas.

Why Amy come back?

Want milk cookies.

“Amy,” he said, “you know we don’t have any damn milk or cookies.” His sudden verbalization startled the others. They looked questioningly at Amy.

For a long time she did not answer. Amy like Peter. Amy sad want Peter.

He felt like crying.

Peter good human person.

Blinking his eyes he signed, Peter tickle Amy. She jumped into his arms.

Later, he questioned her in more detail. But it was a painstakingly slow process, chiefly because of Amy’s difficulty in handling concepts of time.

Amy distinguished past, present, and future—she remembered previous events, and anticipated future promises—but the Project Amy staff had never succeeded in teaching her exact differentiations. She did not, for example, distinguish yesterday from the day before. Whether this reflected a failing in teaching methods or an innate feature of Amy’s conceptual world was an open question. (There was evidence for a conceptual difference. Amy was particularly perplexed by spatial metaphors for time, such as “that’s behind us” or “that’s coming up.” Her trainers conceived of the past as behind them and the future ahead. But Amy’s behavior seemed to indicate that she conceived of the past as in front of her—because she could see it—and the future behind her— because it was still invisible. Whenever she was impatient for the promised arrival of a friend, she repeatedly looked over her shoulder, even if she was facing the door.)

In any case, the time problem was a difficulty in talking to her now, and Elliot phrased his questions carefully. He asked, “Amy, what happened at night? With the gorillas?”

She gave him the look she always gave him when she thought a question was obvious. Amy sleep night.

“And the other gorillas?” Gorillas sleep night.

“All the gorillas?” She disdained to answer.

“Amy,” he said, “gorillas come to our camp at night.” Come this place?

“Yes, this place. Gorillas come at night.”

She thought that over. No. Munro said, “What did she say?”

Elliot said, “She said ‘No.’ Yes, Amy, they come.”

She was silent a moment, and then she signed, Things come.

Munro again asked what she had said.

“She said, ‘Things come.’ “ Elliot translated the rest of her responses for them.

Ross asked, “What things, Amy?”

Bad things.

Munro said, “Were they gorillas, Amy?”

Not gorillas. Bad things. Many bad things come forest come. Breath talk. Come night come.

Munro said, “Where are they now, Amy?”

Amy looked around at the jungle. Here. This bad old place things come.

Ross said, “What things, Amy? Are they animals?” Elliot told them that Amy could not abstract the category “animals.” “She thinks people are animals,” he explained. “Are the bad things people, Amy? Are they human persons?”

No.

Munro said, “Monkeys?”

No. Bad things. not sleep night.

Munro said, “Is she reliable?”

What means?

“Yes,” Elliot said. “Perfectly.”

“She knows what gorillas are?”

Amy good gorilla, she signed.

“Yes, you are,” Elliot said. “She’s saying she’s a good gorilla.”