JUNGLE CHANTS.

Hutt News, Volume 6, Issue 3, 21 June 1933, Page 7

JUNGLE CHANTS.

HUNTING THE GORILLA

Straddling the Equator lies the huge country of shadow, fear and mystery which covers half of the Belgian Congo and a good part of French Equatorial Africa. With scarcely a break this almost inpenetrable belt stretches from the Sudan borders, on the north, to about the fourth degree of south latitude, near the middle of Lake Tanganyika, writes Commander Attilio Gatti, the Italian explorer in the ''Daily Mail." After covering hundreds of ranges of mountains and enclosing in a dark, heavy setting the sapphires of the Kivu. Edward and Albert Lakes, it spreads westward framing the great Kassai and Congo Rivers invades a part of the Cameroons and of Gabon and is defeated only when it reaches the shore of the Atlantic. This is the principal equatorial forest an insuperable wall opposed to the knowledge, to the very life of the whites; and a barrier of superstitious fear which often the most courageous and enlightened of natives dare' not penetrate for there ngagi, the giant gorilla reigns. Only some diminutive caricatures of men, four feet high, have the audacity to enter.ngagi's domain, the MamI buti pygmies. These little beings are among the most primitive of African natives and the several months I spent i with them in the heart of the forest showed me that they are also most independent and happy. Their secret of happiness lies in their complete freedom from wealth or possessions. Their huts are built with a few branches thrown carelessly together; some little animal provides them with skin for clothing. The forest supplies them with all the food they desire. They do not require wealth to buy 1 their wives, as do other African natives for it is their custom .to take -without payment and these tiny women make no pretensions to ornament or to anything else. During my two expeditions in the equatorial forest the pygmies were of invaluable assistance to me. To walk through the forest is, for a white man, really heartbreaking. It is not so much walking as fighting every inch through an almost solid) -wall of trees, bushes, lianas, and heaveily matted vegetation. In this green inferno one loses immediately every sense of direction and without the help of the pygmies would be lost and destined to a horrible death. But the little men, shy and silent, never left me for a minute. Without the slightest hesitation they guided me day and night through their mysterious forest kingdom, finding for me the least difficult routes, opening from time to time a passage for me with their machetes, following with ma thematical precision, the tracks of their implacable enemies, the ngagi. Only in this way was I able to follow- and study for entire weeks now one and now another herd of gorillas, every day surprising some new secret of the intimate life of the gigantic anthropoids. The herd I particularly followed was led by a huge male. The pygmies, who have the habit of, giving a name to each gorilla of their forest, called him Xi-

what a man! One who has enjoyed watching the frolic-some play of Mok and Moina, the two young apes recently installed at the London Zoo, could scarcely realise the strength, the power and the ferocity of the giant gorillas of the mountains. In 'the full tide of maturity and development Kitunibo measured about 6ft 6in. in height and more than Bft. Gin. from the feet to the uplifted hand. To give an idea of his bulk, the plaster cast which I took from a footprint in a muddy clearing measured exactly 12i inches' in length, 6 inches in width, and 7* inche9 at t^he spread of the toes; and the print was impressed four times deeper than the ones left by the pygmies in the same spot. Covered with long, black, wavy fur, which became short, and silvery around the back of the torso, Kitumbe's powerful body gave in every movement an impression of unsurpassable strength and agility. And the ferocity, the diabolically human expression of his features led me to regard him from our first encounter as a very dangerous beast indeed, probably the most dangerous of all the animals I had met in many years spent in Africa. Kitumbo and his family—three females, one half grown gorilla, and one youngster —kept in continuous movement, compelling me from morning to evening to make a tiring march, rendered even more difficult by the necessity of keeping off the scent and avoiding the least noise. These continual wanderings and the fact, known but not explained, that the gorilla never sleeps twice in the same shelter I soon understood were due to the enormous quantity of vegetables the apes devour. I managed once to surprise a herd when it had just arrived at a little clearing covered by the tender green of the miondo a kind of wild celery. All the animals began to eat voraciously and in a few minutes the miondo had entirely vanished. Then at a grunt from the louder the herd moved away. Their preferred foods in addition to the miondo, are young shoots of bamboo, a species of onion, and wild banana, all of which grow in scattered patches through the forest. With their seemingly insatiable appetites they keep on the move for the best part of the day, and evening finds them far away from their sleeping place of the previous night, so that- their most comfortable course is to build a new shelter on the spot.