by John Fowler
“There’s different kinds of flowers,” Dian said curtly as she focused her attention on the rough road ahead.
As we neared the base of Mount Visoke, the road grew rockier and more difficult to traverse. It took on more the look of a dry creek bed, rocks and all, than an actual road. The VW lurched on the uneven surface, and we jarred against the inside of the kombi and each other as it rocked in every direction over the bumps. Up ahead we could clearly see where the farmland ended and the Parc des Volcans began. Tilled soil abruptly gave way to thick wild forest in a line along the base of the volcanoes directly ahead. The once-even border of the park now had deep cuts where the farmlands were encroaching even deeper into the forest. The gorillas and their homeland were being traded for insecticide.
Our arrival had a distinct effect on the locals. In the last half-mile leading up to the park border, people dropped their hoes and shovels and ran from the fields toward the road on which we traveled. The Hutu families pointed at Dian and waved heartily, shouting “Mademoiselli, Mademoiselli,” followed by the typical Kinyarwanda greeting, “Muraho!” They shouted and began to follow us, in a friendly riot, as we bounced along. We could hear thumps as some boys daringly reached out and tapped the sides of the van. Dian’s passing through was obviously an exciting novelty to the Rwandan country folk, and a cargo of new white people who would disappear into the forest with the gorillas must have fueled their imaginations. Dian smiled, then beamed and began waving enthusiastically in all directions like a homecoming queen on parade. I saw how her mood could shift without warning, and certainly felt more at ease with her upbeat demeanor.
The VW bounced to a halt as the road ended abruptly at the foot of Mount Visoke. A wall of cool green forest shot up toward the sky before us. Dian turned the engine off and became dour again as a swarm of locals crowded our vehicle in a babble of Kinyarwanda. She peered through her window into the cluster of ragged and barefoot men. “Shit merde! Goddammit!” Dian pushed her door open shouting, “Oya! Oya! Oya!” . . . the Rwandan word for no.
The mass retreated slightly and one man, wearing shoes and better dressed than the rest, emerged. He was also taller than most, and thinner without the robust rounded facial features typical of the rest in the throng. He wore a dark wool blazer. The others struggled to gain proximity to him, speaking and gesturing emphatically in a bustle of waving arms and chattering mouths. By comparison, they were dressed in tattered clothes and rags. Despite a certain frailty to the man at the center, and jaundice in his eyes, there was an air of arrogance and self-importance in his expression. Dian’s tensions eased at the sight of him.
“That’s Gwehandegaza,” Stuart explained in a low voice to Carolyn and me. “He’s the main porter.” Dian struggled impatiently with a mixture of Swahili and French as she spoke to him. The group of men were fighting to be used as porters for our climb; for one hundred francs, or the equivalent of a dollar, each would carry as much as they could up the mountain for us. Gwehandegaza would cast their fates, sorting out those who would have this dubious privilege.
The mountain’s swirling air engulfed us in a chilly dampness as we opened the door of the van and climbed out. I gazed up at the forest before us and saw heavy dark clouds rushing in overhead, churning around the top of Mount Visoke and engulfing it like a flood. Colder air poured down its slopes as Dian looked up at the volcano and cursed under her breath, “Shit motherfuckit!” The foreboding weather obviously heightened her irritability.
Gwehandegaza quickly chose several men to be our porters, grabbing them by sleeves and arms, and pushing them to the front of the mass. To my utter astonishment, they hoisted Dian’s numerous sloshing five-gallon paraffin containers deftly onto their heads. Dian ordered us to put on our rain gear as we hurried to gather our things. I began to collect my belongings out of the back of the vehicle and searched for my parcel of eggs, but couldn’t find it. Each of us donned our rain jackets, then stumbled to tug on our rain pants over our boots. In the chaos, it felt like it was everyone for themselves, and I decided the most efficient approach would be to carry my own weight, not expecting others to look after my things. Besides, turning my belongings over to these new strangers felt a little risky to me. I also thought it was more efficient to stay out of everyone’s way, especially Dian’s, but she chided me when she saw me pick up my bags.
“Goddamn it, get some of these things!” she barked, pointing to an assortment of groceries and supplies that she had purchased at the market in Ruhengeri. I donned my backpack, as a porter swept up my suitcase onto his head.
Stuart began pulling camp items onto his own personal load, and Carolyn followed suit. Soon the three of us were gathering anything and everything, stumbling over each other in an unorganized mass with the porters.
At the base of Mount Visoke, we were at eight thousand feet. Loaded down, we would be climbing to ten thousand, a total of two thousand feet up. The looming clouds appeared close enough to touch, and rapidly churning as if boiling downward. While Mount Visoke disappeared into the growing black cloudbank, I realized that our group, wearing rubber rain gear, would be walking up into this inverted cauldron of a sky in which the mountains were now immersed.
The stony road ended at the very base of the mountain slope where someone had erected a large steel rondavel by the forest’s edge. It looked more like a temporary storage setup than a home. Just shy of this, Fossey’s entourage of porters disappeared up a muddy trail through thick undergrowth beneath the canopy of trees. In a single file of skilled porters and naïve students, we left the heavily populated farmlands behind us, and, stepping into the realm of the mountain gorilla, we began our ascent into a forest in the clouds.
FOUR
KARISOKE WELCOME
I saw the inconceivable mystery of a soul that knew no restraint, no faith, and no fear, yet struggling blindly with itself.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
It was the beginning of the long rainy season, and recent downpours had made the Porter Trail thick with mud. The path quickly became steep as Dian, Stuart, Carolyn, and I mingled with the remaining porters and dispersed into single file, losing sight of each other. Dian trailed behind, along the narrow path that cut through the dense undergrowth. Eons of sporadic forest visitors, and erosion, had worn this trail to a sort of trench, here and there, deep and dark beneath the tangled canopy of green. Soon, we entered a sort-of tunnel, but open at the top, with walls of ancient lava covered in moss. As we emerged, I was awed by the porters upslope from me, deftly balancing Dian’s large sloshing vessels of paraffin atop their heads while chattering away in Kinyarwanda. The image of their bare feet sucking out of the cold mud as they climbed burned into my mind’s eye as I quickly became winded bearing my own cargo in the thin air.
Not far up the trail, I had to stop to catch my breath. To my left, I could see an endless row of tiny farm plots and mud huts stretching below and beyond, away from the parklands, where stands of bamboo, Arundinaria alpina, spread along the boundary, interspersed with tall vernonias, a tree form of Vernonia calvoana, where parkland gave way to cultivated soil. In contrast, through a clearing just beneath me, I noticed a tidy little camp harboring two dapper orange-red dome tents trimmed with bright blue pole sleeves, all glowing in sharp contrast to the neighboring tilled brown fields and thatched mud dwellings. A pair of folding director’s chairs stood by an extinguished campfire in a ring of black stones. I paused for a moment, staring at this neat little camp, and wondered who the occupants could be.
A sudden downdraft of cold mist soon obscured the view and snapped my attention back to the trail ahead. I resumed my hike into the clouds in a gust of wind, and within a few more steps of climbing, the sky released its own burden, pelting our long caravan of travelers with a deafening rumble of rain. I paused to don my hood and button up, but the porters, exposed in only their cotton rags, didn’t miss a beat. I struggled to keep up with them, as we emerged from the bamboo zone into an open forest of robust
, spreading hagenia trees, Hagenia abyssinica, and wispy hypericums, Hypericum lanceolatum—a tree form of Saint John’s wort.
In the torrents, rivulets of water began flowing down the trail, and we were soon trudging along in what became a steep creek bed of mud and tumbling water. And then the sound, already deafening, shifted to a roar, drowning out even the loudest of the men’s voices ahead. White pebbles the size of marbles bounced and tumbled off of everything, settling into the lowest places at the center of our deep and narrow path. Hail at the equator?! My heart pounded as I let a couple more porters pass me, my legs slowing to a monotonous rhythmic pace, willing each step. The agile porters, with their burdens ably managed, moved rapidly upward and out of sight. Even those with the heavy, sloshing paraffin containers slipped deftly around me. I marveled at their bare feet tromping onward through the accumulating layer of ice pebbles in the cold sucking mud. Hail rattled against my plastic rain hood and the forest’s thick leaf fronds. The icy pebbles quickly accumulated . . . two, three, four inches deep. I only had the energy to stare zombie-like at my feet while willing myself onward and upward through the storm, the noise and sensation too intense to feel the throb of my own heartbeat.
The downpour ended as suddenly as it had begun, and I was jarred out of my trance when almost stepping on what appeared to be a snake. The creature, fat and flesh-colored, lolled as if dazed by the storm, on a bare bump of the trail where the hailstones had rolled away. On closer examination, I recognized it as some type of earthworm—but over twelve inches long and an inch wide, more like a foot-long hot dog come to life! Several porters had stopped to watch when I reached a finger toward its long pink body. One of the men shouted at me. I drew back shrugging my shoulders at the startled men in an effort to show my confusion at their alarm. Did they think this creature was dangerous? In a moment, my curiosity regained its composure and I picked up a stick to poke the giant earthworm. At that, the worm writhed, squirting fine jets of milky fluid in all directions from the sides of its body. I jumped backward as my onlookers nearly toppled each other in their efforts to flee. I later learned that this critter was in fact one of the world’s few species of giant earthworms. Neither toxic nor otherwise dangerous, the milky fluid is actually a lubricant that the animal uses to facilitate movement through its underground tunnels. Like earthworms and night crawlers in North America, this tropical counterpart surfaces when heavy precipitation floods its subterranean lairs.
Our climbing continued upward another half hour until the mucky trail became wider and grassy, leveling off and opening to a small meadow—the halfway mark, I would learn. Here the porters dropped their gear and sat on the ground, resting on clean patches of grass amid drifts of slushy hail already melting away around us. The men smiled as I dropped to my knees among them and gasped for the thin air in a disheveled heap of my own cargo.
The sky began to clear while I regained a more normal breathing pattern and heart rate. A couple of porters with the paraffin containers, in preparation to resume our hike, ripped up handfuls of long grass and rolled them into large, thick wreaths. These, they refined with careful winding of loose ends into neat, tight rings before placing them on their heads—cushions to stabilize their burdens. I watched their proficient skill with a little awe. Out of curiosity, and partially for their amusement, I grabbed some grass and tried to do the same. The porters laughed as my sloppy construction fell apart on my head and shoulders.
The second half of the climb felt as arduous as the first, as the trail resumed its slant, but the sun was out and hastened the melting of drifts of hail. My sweat, stranded inside my rubber rain gear, made me go from feeling sauna-hot one moment to being clammy-cold when I stopped to catch my breath. As the trail broadened into clearings and leveled off, I caught up with Carolyn, standing at rest near a small boggy clearing.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” She asked, turning to face me, wet hair strands plastered to her flushed cheeks. Then I saw what she meant—behind her in the distance soared the towering steep rocky peak of Mount Mikeno, now visible in the clear rain-washed air. It stood entirely in Zaire, and I was dazzled by its sight. Its jagged monolith of bare dark gray volcanic rock jutted boldly upward over fourteen thousand feet, lit dramatically by the low-angled sun. Steam wafted from the stony pinnacles, tearing loose to drift away as small clouds. I knew from what I had read back home that Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, had his camp at the base of this mountain. I paused to take a picture of the dramatic volcano before continuing farther into camp.
A long green corrugated metal cabin on the right of the trail was the first building I passed coming into Dian Fossey’s remote compound, Karisoke Research Center. A large glossy white-necked raven, Corvus albicollis, eyed my approach from the roof’s apex, before emitting a deep throaty croak from its thick arched beak and flapping upward into the branches of a tall hagenia. Through the cabin’s windows, I could see it was empty.
Traveling a hundred yards farther up the trail, I found a similar building on the left, just up from a gurgling streambed that cut through camp and was then engorged with water from the rain and melting hail. A square of the same green metal, supported by cut saplings, formed a crude entry portico to this cabin. Behind and beyond in the distance, cone-shaped Mount Karisimbi gleamed in the low-angled sunlight; higher even than Europe’s Matterhorn, it is the tallest of the Virungas and one of Africa’s tallest peaks. This mountain’s pointed cap of volcanic cinders had been lava-black on our approach from below, but just then gleamed white with a crown of shining hailstones at its frosty summit. I would learn that karisimbi was a Rwandan word for the tiny cowry shells used for barter and adornment throughout Africa. Although these marine snail shells came from the coast, the lowlanders who rarely encountered hail created the myth that the white cap that appeared on Karisimbi after a storm was actually a layer of the cowry shells. The view was fleeting and Mount Karisimbi’s gleaming white crown soon disappeared in a wash of mist.
“This one’s ours,” Stuart said to me as he emerged from the far end of the cabin, “Carolyn, yours is up ahead.” Stuart showed me to the door of my half of our “duplex” and then accompanied Carolyn up the path. “Drop your things off and c’mon up this way to Dian’s when you’re done!” he shouted back to me.
Inside, I let my luggage slide to the floor and gazed around my new home. The air inside was colder than out, and it smelled like damp straw with the walls and floor covered with dun-colored woven grass matting. A large wooden office desk with chair and a cot-like narrow bed furnished the single room that measured about ten by twelve feet. A large pale green map of the Virungas, with odd place names labeled and the gorilla study range outlined in black, was pinned to the grass wall by the desk. A small, crude iron barrel stove stood by the door attached to a stovepipe that vented through the roof, and a long wood shelf ran under a window along the end wall, its right end serving as the bed’s nightstand. A few wine bottles were grouped on this shelf, filled with a tea-colored liquid—water from the camp stream, boiled and delivered for drinking, I would soon learn. Outside the window, a pair of black-headed waxbills, Estrilda atricapilla, hopped in the thick grasses, plucking seeds here and there, before flitting upward with a flash of their bright red rumps.
My curiosity was next drawn back inside to a mysterious boarded-up section of the back wall under a row of cabinets. Here, someone had blocked a low two-by-two-foot opening to the outside, too small for practical human passage. Looking out a window on this wall, I could see a large cage made of wood and welded wire attached to the cabin where this opening had been. From the look of it, I was right to surmise that Dian’s orphaned gorillas, made popular in a her previous National Geographic article, had once lived in this half of the cabin, granted indoor and outdoor access via the contrived pet portal. I was in Coco’s and Pucker’s house.
A rectangular gap in the wall’s grass matting revealed the outline of a human-sized door in the cabin’s shared inner dividing wall. Moved
by my curiosity, I pulled at the wood toggle of a string pull, and opened the door into Stuart’s half of our hut. The warm air inside this space felt welcoming after the ice storm. My new coworker’s space matched mine in size and configuration, but was fully equipped with cooking utensils, a lantern, a small kerosene cookstove, and a typewriter. It was a home. Stuart’s clothing and books, stacked along a shelf, with the fire flickering in his iron stove gave it a lived-in feel. Someone had even placed bright orange flowers in a jar on the shelf under his window, a gift from Dian, I surmised. In the scene of equipment and accoutrements, I saw the look of certain favor bestowed on Stuart.
My curiosity satisfied, I withdrew back into my own Spartan space. Outside my window, a final throng of porters accompanied Dian, bringing up the rear of our assemblage, and heading farther up the Porter Trail. I took a few moments to peel off my rain gear and organize my bags before heading out the door and up the path where Stuart, Carolyn, and Dian had already gone. The aromas of wood smoke and wet dirt permeated the damp, cool air, with another pungent smell—just beyond our cabin, a green metal outhouse stood, that would be Stuart’s and my shared facility. Looking back to the left, toward the camp creek, I noticed four wood posts supporting a small metal roof over an eight-by-eight-foot dugout in the ground. Benches lined the excavation’s interior around a smoldering fire pit in the center. A hand-hewn picnic table with its own benches stood nearby. All around this area, the grass was worn away to bare dirt by the foot traffic of many boot prints.
Turning right onto the camp’s main trail I continued on past a large green metal shed, open at both ends. Inside, white enamel wash pans sat atop a workbench spanning the interior. Dingy dish towels and assorted rags hung from a clothesline strung over the dirt floor. A gray squirrel, looking similar to the common gray squirrels of home, but slightly smaller and flattened in appearance, bounded along the bare ground and scurried up the incline of a moss-covered hagenia. I would later learn this was the Ruwenzori sun squirrel, Heliosciurus ruwenzorii, endemic to these high montane forests.