I Married Adventure

by Osa Johnson

  Chief Deelia seemed to feel a little less sure of himself with so many strange subchiefs and tribesmen around, but after a while we coaxed him into starting a little dance. His son and several others joined in, two or three drummers took their positions, and in a very little while our clearing was filled with dancing pygmies. Their dance was a hop, really, and the tiny people had the look of so many dolls on strings. Even mothers with their babies strapped to their backs hopped to the rhythm of the drums, and every male pygmy clutched a bow and arrow.

  One pretty, feminine show-off decided to do a solo and skipped about coyly for the greater part of an hour, much to the amusement of the rest of the women and girls. By dint of considerable patience, I persuaded some of the women to show us how they cooked their rice and bananas, and Martin coaxed the men into a friendly boxing match. The last ended in a free-for-all, but, fortunately, there were no serious consequences.

  Biologically and psychologically, these pygmies of the Ituri forest are very like those we found on the island of Espíritu Santo in the New Hebrides group. They are shy and elusive and constantly on the move, with the darker, remoter parts of the forest their favorite habitat. Their possessions are limited to crudely made bows and poisoned arrows and a couple of clay pots; their homes are the barest of shelters that can be put up in a few hours and as easily scattered, leaving no trace.

  The domestic life of these people is clean, wholesome, admirable. We could learn but little of their courtship, although we managed to photograph a wedding, and were told that once a man took a mate, he did not part from her. As far as we could find out they had no religion, and gave no thought to the hereafter and very little more to the present.

  Theirs, it might be said, was a Utopian existence, for they showed neither hate, greed, vanity, envy, nor any other of the dominatingly unpleasant emotions of our so-called civilized world. Each man plays his pleasant game of life, with no desire to interfere with, and caring little about, the conduct of his fellows.

  As long as bananas are available to them, however, it must be admitted that there is one vice to which they yield. Drunkenness. Martin found most interesting their method of achieving this state. It was, simply, to gather a lot of overripe bananas, carry them to a hollowed-out log, dump them in, and mash them. Five days were sufficient to turn this pulp into an evil-smelling, acrid mess which, for alcoholic content, must have been potent indeed, for we have seen whole villages—men, women, and children—drink a little of the beer and go on a hilarious spree.

  A fact which has puzzled many scientists is that once the breath of life has passed from the body of these tiny people, they seem to vanish from the earth. No one, to my knowledge, has ever found a burial ground, and one scientist whom we met while in the Belgian Congo said that he had searched for years hoping to find a skull which he might study, but that he had never found one. More, he said that he had given up all hope of finding one.

  Martin and I tried to learn from these diminutive blacks what they thought of death or whether they had any thoughts or beliefs of a hereafter, but they seemed not to understand what we were talking about. They lived, apparently, only in the present, and tomorrow didn’t exist.

  At the end of several months among the pygmies of the Ituri forest even my exacting husband agreed that our film and sound recordings probably were as complete as we could hope to make them. On the day that he reluctantly made this decision, we had upwards of five hundred of the tiny actors in our camp, and with all their good nature, they were growing somewhat petulant. They were unaccustomed to the burning African sun and longed for the chill dampness and constant twilight of the forest. Too, our white rice and sugar and salt, which at first had been such a treat, now palled on them, and they longed for their usual diet of spinach-like grass, grubs, flying ants, and a bit of monkey or elephant meat now and then.

  On the morning that we told them they could go, they danced and screamed with joy. Lining them up, we gave each a little bag of salt, a handful of beads, a half yard of cheap calico, a package of tobacco, a box of matches, and, to their delight, a guest cake of pink soap, on which we saw them at once begin to nibble. By night there wasn’t a trace of pygmy. They were gone like small black shadows, back to their native forest.

  Chapter 28

  “This is going to be fine! I remember saying enthusiastically to my husband and to DeWitt and our sound men—to the world in general, in fact. “I love this!”

  Martin smiled. He looked wonderful, not in the least tired, even though our pygmy trip had been so trying and the preparations for this safari into the high haunts of the gorillas had been filled, as always, with tiresome and irritating details. I had tied a new red bandanna around his throat just before we started out and he appeared very gay.

  We had outfitted at Rutshuru for our safari up Mount Mikeno. Those is charge of this government station had cooperated to the fullest possible extent in helping us stock up with food supplies and to find the hundred and fifty or more porters and guides necessary for our undertaking.

  It was an invigorating day;—bright, not too hot—when at least we were at the foot of Mount Mikeno, ready to start our climb. I remembered many times afterwards how I had looked up those steep slopes, thick with jungle forests, and thought how much I was going to enjoy the lush growth after the hot, bare plains of Tanganyika.

  The mountains seemed to rise almost straight up, and, we had been told at Rutshuru, it was twenty-one miles to the saddle at the top. I saw Martin looked up there often as we climbed, with a deep sort of thoughtfulness in his eyes; for that was where Carl Akeley lay in his last sleep.

  At noon on October 10, we arrived at the Lubenga Mission, an outpost of religion ruled over by five jolly White Fathers and four sweet nuns, who devoted their lives to the spiritual and physical welfare of the native blacks. The settlement was made up of many low, rambling, but attractive buildings, which housed workshops of various kinds, schools, dwellings, and a large church. Lovely gardens of flowers and vegetables lent a pleasant, rustic touch to the whole. The fathers put a comfortable, three-room rest house at our disposal and were extremely generous with their fruits and vegetables.

  Lubenga is located on the side of Mount Mikeno, at the edge of, but not within, the Parc National Albert. The White Fathers were earnest in their praise of Carl Akeley for his efforts in persuading the Belgian government to set this land aside as a game reserve and gorilla sanctuary.

  The good White Fathers were deeply interested in Martin’s work as a whole and in this undertaking in particular, but they were dubious, too.

  “It is true,” they said thoughtfully, “there are many gorillas on the higher slopes, but Mount Mikeno is not kind to strangers.” Quickly then, the friar who was speaking amended this. “The weather is often very unkind,” he said.

  Gaily, as always, and unmindful of gloomy warnings, we set out on the next morning with a hundred and fifty or so porters carrying our equipment, and our guides leading the way to a temporary base.

  * * *

  —

  “Couldn’t sleep last night…. All worn out…. Our nerves on edge. Making pictures of gorillas isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.”

  This is an item under the date of October 23, taken from my diary.

  Gorillas were all around us. We heard them feeding, thumping their barrel-like chests, and screaming invectives at us, but by the time we had climbed through the cold mists and rains and thick, sopping jungle growth to where we had heard them, they were gone, usually, beyond our view.

  I wished passionately that I were back on the warm—yes, and barren—plains of Tanganyika.

  “It’s all perfectly silly,” I mumbled to myself as I slipped and slid. The high altitude cut short my breath. “Even when we do catch up with a gorilla, the light’s no good and we can’t photograph him.”

  Almost invariably, of course, just as I’d finished some such demoralized
mumbling, a gorilla would show himself, the sun would break through the mist, and my husband would manage to get a very nice picture.

  We reached a plateau, finally, perhaps a quarter of a mile in width.

  “This is wonderful!” I said, standing erect for the first time in hours, with my feet planted firmly on the nice, flat earth. “Why, I could keep on going forever here!”

  I was soon to change my mind, however. The undergrowth, reaching to my waist, was so thick and laced with such tough vines that to walk through it was impossible.

  Both Martin and DeWitt looked completely baffled. Our men looked discouraged. Our headman, Bukhari, however, looked enormously pleased with himself and with the world as he found it. I watched him in a sort of stupefied astonishment as, suddenly, his head disappeared beneath the surface of the matted growth and then reappeared almost instantly some twenty feet away. The effect was similar to that achieved by an underwater swimmer, who goes down in one place and comes up suddenly in another.

  Dramatically, he revealed his discovery to us. He had found a tunnel through the impenetrable growth, a tunnel made by the huge gorillas.

  “Fine!” shouted Martin. “Good old Bukhari!”

  My husband bobbed out of sight into the tunnel. DeWitt and the men followed, and I, perforce, did likewise.

  I think, incidentally, that I should make mention here of the fact that whenever our sound men, Richard Maedler and Louis Tappen, seem to have been lost somewhere in the narrative, it is because they were either back in camp or down at the mission, or, equally likely, back at Rutshuru, doing what they could—and heroically—to repair the delicate mechanism of our sound equipment. These men, to put it approximately in their own words, had had to turn into a pair of nurses. Martin said, and often, that the honor of making the first sound pictures in Central Africa and the Belgian Congo really belongs to Dick and Lou.

  Mostly on hands and knees, for days on end, we trailed the big gorillas through their dank, green passageways. These led, of course, straight to both feeding grounds and nests, and, when a few good pictures were secured, aching muscles didn’t matter in the least.

  The favorite foods of these hairy monsters, we found, as we pursued them on all fours through their tunnels, are the slender shoots of scrub bamboo and a wild, bitter celery.

  My first encounter with one of the Mount Mikeno apes had me just about as frightened as anything that had happened to me in years. It was on a Sunday morning. Martin had decided to sleep a little later than usual, and I thought it would be nice to surprise him at lunch with some wild celery. The sun was shining fitfully and, encouraged by its cheeriness and warmth, I wandered perhaps a quarter of a mile from our plateau camp. Standing in the middle of a celery patch, I had just stripped a stalk down to its white, tender heart and taken an experimental bite. Its bitterness, worse than quinine, astonished me, somehow, and I spat it out with accompanying noises. Suddenly, then, I heard a loud grunt just behind me and, whirling, found myself face to face with an enormous gorilla.

  “Nagapate!” I yelled, for no reason at all, and ran for dear life.

  Martin had missed me, and I ran squarely into him not fifty yards away.

  “What’s that about Nagapate?” he asked, quite puzzled.

  When I had caught my breath, I tried to explain. For some reason, the sudden appearance of that black face had reminded me of that terrifing experience on our first trip to Malekula.

  “He just made me think of Nagapate, that’s all,” I said crossly. My husband was laughing at me. As a matter of fact, at that moment, with my fright still upon me, it would have been very easy for me to believe the gorilla capable of any and all the stories of kidnaping and general ferocity attributed to him. That the big animal had made no move to touch me didn’t occur to me until much later.

  A fine subject for my husband’s camera and sound equipment, but maddeningly elusive, the gorilla is the largest of all ape species. He weighs from four hundred to six hundred and fifty pounds and stands from five-and-a-half to six feet tall. His head juts almost neckless from his enormous, hairy torso, and his long arms and bent legs propel him along at amazing speed. The treetops, where he would like occasionally to travel about, won’t hold his great weight, and he is forced to stay for the most part on the ground. Here he runs in packs of varying size.

  Martin had succeeded finally in securing pictures of the big fellow eating and a mother gorilla caring for her young, but it seemed to me we were weeks catching them at the job of making their beds.

  Stationing ourselves in hiding in what we hoped would be a likely place, we finally saw and recorded the entire procedure. It is simple enough, and just as crude as might be expected.

  First, the gorilla advances upon a spot which, with much chest pounding, he declares to be his own. Then he squints suspiciously in all directions, ready, apparently, to take on all challengers.

  The big fellow’s next move is to sit down right where he is and pull the tall grass around him. This he laces in some manner over his head, achieving a sort of cage, then he reaches outside for whatever leaves, moss, or tender grasses happen to be about. Carelessly these are tossed about, to sit on, lie on, or eat—the whole business is very haphazard—and the moment the sun has dipped below the horizon, he is asleep. At sun-up he is awake and off, leaving his nest in an unspeakably filthy condition.

  * * *

  —

  For some reason wholly incomprehensible to Martin and me, Bukhari was suddenly possessed of the conviction that the Alimbongo Mountains would be a far better place in which to pursue our gorilla hunts. The good fellow was persistent, and since Mount Mikeno, with its thick undergrowth, had presented so many difficulties, the matter of persuading us was relatively easy. Before we left, however, we climbed to Carl Akeley’s grave.

  It was a hard, steep climb. A cold drizzle had set in, and at every step our clothing slapped soddenly against our bodies. Just as we reached the saddle, the sun broke through the low-hanging, forbidding clouds. The mountaintops, green jungles, and yellow and purple veld showed in wide-swept, lavish proportions. We were glad Carl could rest in a place of such peace and majestic beauty.

  We pitched camp close to our friend’s resting place and remained long enough to make some much-needed repairs. The cement slab was in perfect condition, but the stockade needed rebuilding. While the men were doing this, I planted hardy ferns and vines all about and left, on the grave, a large wreath of the wildflowers that Carl had loved.

  * * *

  —

  First, we headed for Kibondo, a village on the slopes of the Alimbongo Mountains. Steep grades and many hairpin turns made our progress slow, but the roads were smooth and hard and we arrived with our mass of equipment in good shape.

  Kibondo is some eight thousand feet above sea level, and its intelligent, energetic natives, some three hundred in number, devote much time to their well-kept truck gardens. The surrounding country has a thick jungle growth very like that of Mount Mikeno, but the many well-packed trails made travel through it comparatively easy for us.

  Contrary to Martin’s pessimistic expectations, we learned from the natives that gorillas were to be found everywhere in the district, and that while the villagers had a wholesome respect for the big apes, they accepted them as a part of their everyday life. For this reason, doubtless, they were puzzled to understand our interest in them, and, naturally, we didn’t try to explain.

  With an unremitting persistence that surprised even me, Martin set about inquiring into the alleged ferocity of the gorilla. What truth was there, he asked over and over of every native we met, in the stories so generally accepted in every part of the civilized world, of women and children being carried off by the huge anthropoids, and of men being killed by them? In all instances, the natives shook their heads and even eyed us a little suspiciously because we could put credence in such tales.

  “
Why should gorillas carry off women?” said one. “Women are made only to carry firewood, plant gardens, and build houses, and gorillas don’t have fires, houses, or gardens!”

  I began to see that as my husband put these questions to the villagers, there was even more behind his inquiries than an explorer’s interest in his subject of the moment. I was soon to learn what this interest was.

  “I’m going to take one of these big fellows back with me to the States,” he said one day. “I think it’s about time all those stories of the viciousness of the gorilla should be debunked.”

  “What?” I demanded, remembering the trouble we’d had getting even friendly Bessie back to the States.

  Martin was lost in thought. “I’m going to give the folks back there a chance to see the gorilla, how big he is and strong, and yet how he never uses either his size or strength to hurt a single living thing.”

  With his usual thoroughness, my husband went about obtaining a permit from the Belgian government that would allow us to capture one of the enormous animals. While waiting for this permit to arrive, we moved easily with our equipment over good trails to where the animals were and made a fine record of them in both pictures and sound.

  “Well,” I said dubiously, “I suppose you know what you’re doing.”

  My husband had the coveted permit tucked safely in his pocket and had arranged with the village headman, Chief Pawko, to supply us—for a price—with native hunters. It had rained all morning of the “big day”—that was my name for it—but the sun came out nicely by noon, and it was then that Chief Pawko presented himself. With a large manner, he said that he had brought with him several hundred brave huntsmen and a great pack of gorilla hounds.

  What we found on inspection was a self-conscious group of about seventy-five blacks who shuffled uneasily as we looked them over. The dogs, half starved and mangy and numbering exactly six, were led about on leashes and wore wooden bells.