The plane’s controls seemed to move erratically, with a life of their own, as we bumped through the turbulence. Noise from the tiny aircraft’s single propeller made conversation difficult, so I left the pilot beside me alone to concentrate and stared out the window at the clouds towering above us. We’d taken off from Libreville, Gabon, and headed east for an hour before crossing the border into the République du Congo. A line of rocky escarpments marked the edge of the Congo Basin, and from ten thousand feet up, the forest stretched unbroken to a flat horizon in every direction. The canopy far below was a subtle blend of a thousand different greens. Endless rivers flowed through the forest like veins in a leaf, and apart from the occasional village set on a riverbank, I hadn’t seen any sign of human habitation. We’d crossed a frontier to enter a place beyond the modern world. Down there, it seemed, lay endless secrets and mysteries just waiting to be discovered.
A week later I was deep inside the forest, in a region of pristine jungle called the Goualougo Triangle that had recently come to the attention of scientists for its large population of chimpanzees. Hundreds of them had been found living here, insulated and protected from the outside world by the vast wilderness surrounding them. But what made the Goualougo chimps so special was that, unlike any other population, they’d had no contact with people, so they displayed no fear. If anything, they seemed just as interested in us as we were in them, their natural curiosity drawing them in to take a closer look at us. Such encounters could last several hours and allowed Dave, the resident primatologist, to document new natural behavior. Surrounded by a dozen chimps sitting only feet away, staring at us intently, I was often left to wonder who was studying who.
National Geographic was running a series of articles on the region, and their staff photographer, Nick, was very keen to get up into the canopy to record the chimps in their own world. I’d bumped into Nick while working on a different project earlier that year. He’d walked into camp unannounced one afternoon, introducing himself in a soft Alabama accent. We’d talked for an hour or so about working in the canopy before he offered me a job as his camera assistant, telling me to finalize details with the NG offices back in Washington. He’d then strolled back into the trees to leave me wondering whether the whole encounter had really just happened or not. It had been a mysterious but fortuitous meeting, and I was excited at the prospect of working with such an esteemed photographer.
Nick had sent me on ahead to the Goualougo, with instructions to install a platform in the canopy opposite a suitable fruiting fig tree. It had taken Dave and me the better part of a week to find it, but the moment we’d seen the huge fruiting tree, we knew it was special. Its enormous branches groped out through the surrounding canopy like tentacles. Unlike the stand-alone giants of Borneo, the canopy here was one continuous highway of tangled branches, and it was often impossible to tell where one tree stopped and the next began. Branches of one tree became entwined with those of its neighbors to form one vast interconnected web. This African fig seemed to ramble on through the surrounding canopy for hundreds of feet in every direction, its huge limbs twisting and kinking their way through the branches of neighboring trees until they merged together.
At 150 feet, this tree wasn’t nearly as tall as the towering strangler fig trees of Borneo, but what it lacked in height was more than made up for in character and sheer presence. Its gnarled appearance seemed to epitomize the mysterious, brooding nature of this dark forest.
It carried by far the most fruit I’d ever seen on any tree, and all the figs were massive, the size of tangerines. Each one hung from its own short stalk sprouting directly out from the tree’s bark. I’d assumed fruit always grew delicately from the tips of twigs, but the massive trunk and branches of this tree were absolutely smothered in a haphazard jumble.
Presumably the tree produced a crop like this every year, which was an incredible thought in itself, given the amount of energy required. How could so much fruit be eaten before it spoiled and fell rotting to the forest floor? Any animal browsing along the branches was sure to dislodge and waste just as much as it ate. But this, of course, was the point. The tree had some pretty big stomachs to fill, both in the canopy and below. A clan of thirty chimps would go through these branches fast, as would a family of gorillas. And then there were the smaller primates, not to mention the fruit bats and the birds. Far below, the ground crew would hoover up any spoils. Elephants, pigs, buffalo, antelope . . . the list was endless. They would come from miles around to visit the tree. Long-lived, intelligent animals with excellent memories had learned from their parents where this tree stood and what time of year it fruited. It was an important landmark, and the junction of ancient game trails at its base was testament to this.
Wasting no time, I rigged a canopy platform as quickly as I could. I’d found a good view of the tree’s laden branches from eighty feet up in a smaller adjacent tree, and once the platform was in position I installed a canvas hide to sit in. It would be a week or so before Nick could join us, so I decided to spend some time up there before he arrived. Nothing happened at all on the first couple of days. By midday on the third I was beginning to despair when I suddenly noticed a tall, slender tree next to me starting to shake and sway.
Something big was climbing up from the ground eighty feet below. Whatever it was climbed quickly with great strength, stopping every now and then, presumably to peer up through the foliage. It must have seen my platform from the ground and come in for a closer look.
The narrow window of my camera hide prevented me from seeing anything other than what lay directly ahead. So I sat there patiently waiting for my visitor to reveal itself. Honeybees buzzed loudly in my ears. Dozens of them were crawling over my sweat-soaked shirt to lick the salt. I was wearing a head-net, which covered my face, but every now and then one squirmed up through the tiny gap at my collar to sting me on the cheek or ear. To open the net and let it out was to invite another hundred in. So I sat there as stoically as I could, waiting to see what the next few minutes would bring.
The thin tree stopped swaying long enough for me to think the mystery climber had gone back down. But a few minutes later, an ear-splitting scream cut through the noise of bees and I realized I’d been rumbled. Curiosity had drawn a chimpanzee up into the canopy and it didn’t like what it had found. I regretted not camouflaging my hide a little better. But then, how do you conceal yourself effectively from an ape that has grown up in this forest and knows every tree individually? I was clearly an intrusion that wouldn’t be tolerated, and I worried the game was up.
But over the next five minutes there was no other sound, and I realized the chimp must still be there in the tree looking at me. Crouching inside my sweatbox, trying not to move or flinch as I got stung yet again, I held my breath as the chimp decided what to do next. The thin tree eventually began to sway again, and an adult female climbed into view twenty feet away. Muscular, with a broad, dark face and grizzled hair, she could now see me clearly through the hide’s open canvas flap. Without taking her eyes from mine, she climbed onto a branch and sat down to stare intently across the open space between us.
My heart was racing, and I did my best to keep still as I returned her gaze. She didn’t seem scared; in fact, with an elbow resting on her knee she looked surprisingly relaxed as she slowly scratched her chin with the back of her hand. There was great intelligence behind those beautiful hazel eyes. This could easily be the first time she’d ever encountered a human being, and there was little doubt I was the first she’d ever met in the canopy.
A minute or so later she was joined by a second, much smaller chimp—her son, a three-year-old with a pale face and enormous ears. There was a wonderful air of mischief about him. All elbows and knees, he clambered over Mum to hang staring, while swinging from one arm. After exchanging a few soft hoots of reassurance with him, the female leaned gently back against the tree and closed her eyes. They flicked open again a few seconds later, as if to check whether I had moved, and then, closing them again, she went to sleep. Her son quickly lost interest in me and took full advantage of this uninterrupted playtime by climbing and leaping around the branches like a lunatic. I couldn’t stop myself from laughing as he jumped and swung around the canopy with a freedom that I could only dream of. Eventually Mum, waking, stretched out a hand and grabbed him firmly by the ankle, but he wrestled free again, so she gave up and went back to sleep. An hour later, tired from his antics, he climbed onto his mother’s tummy and fell asleep in her arms.
Brushing the bees off my binoculars, I focused through my head-net to take a closer look at the pair while they slept. The youngster’s face was hidden, but I could see his mum’s clearly: her soft black skin crisscrossed with fine lines and wrinkles. Wisps of white hair grew on her chin, and there was a small scar beneath her nose. A heavy brow shielded her eyes, and I could see pale patches of skin on her eyelids. But what amazed me most was the way in which those eyelids were twitching. Her eyeballs were moving from side to side beneath them, and I suddenly realized she must be dreaming. I stared in amazement and couldn’t help wondering where she had gone to in her sleep. What images were flashing across her mind’s eye right at this moment? Was she swinging through the familiar canopy of her own jungle world, or had she slipped its borders to enter a realm far beyond anything I could ever imagine?
The afternoon slid by slowly as I watched the two chimps sleeping. Occasionally one stirred and opened its eyes to look at me, but for the most part I was ignored. By five o’clock the shadows were rising, and it was obvious the chimps intended to sleep the night there. Not wanting to disturb them, I climbed out the back of my hide as quietly as possible and hung on my rope, ready to abseil. The chimps remained asleep, and it felt good to be out in the open canopy alongside them. The bees had disappeared, returning to their hive for the night. They’d be back in the morning, but for now I removed my stifling head-net and breathed the cool, fragrant air deep into my lungs. It was wonderful to be free of the sickly smell of bee venom and the incessant buzzing. It was also good to see the forest clearly, rather than through a dark blur of nylon mesh, for the first time in twelve hours.
For a few more minutes I hung there, watching the mother and child sleeping in the branches twenty feet away. The ground below was now in darkness, but the canopy was still bathed in the soft apricot glow of the setting African sun. The female must have felt me watching her, and stirred. Sitting up, she glanced across before bending several branches in toward the trunk to make her nest for the night. She then lay down on her side to face me. Her son had awoken too, and was on his back next to her, playing with his feet while casually looking at me with innocent eyes that sparkled in the evening light. Why, of all the trees here, had they chosen to spend the night in one so close to me? I’ll never know, but it was a scene of profound beauty. A fleeting glimpse of how things must have been millions of years ago before animals learned to fear us. An echo of Eden.
I could have stayed there for hours just watching them. I wanted to experience the forest at night the way they did—rocked gently to sleep in the top of their tree. But I couldn’t. It was getting dark and time for me to go. Leaning back in my harness, I edged down the trunk until I was below the understory, then abseiled the final fifty feet to the forest floor. Stashing my harness at the base of the tree, I stood in the gloom to allow my eyes to adjust. The forests of the Congo are no place for a person to be caught walking around after nightfall. Big things move through the shadows, and blundering into an elephant in the dark could be a fatal error.
It was a forty-minute walk back to camp, and turning on my flashlight, I made my way silently and warily down the trail. Huge, complicated networks of elephant paths wind through these forests. These endless corridors provide an easy way for all sorts of animals to get around. But extreme caution is required. For such enormous creatures, elephants can be surprisingly quiet, especially when moving along these soft, sandy trails. A point-blank encounter with one can be a terrifying experience, especially if it decides to charge. As the figs came into ripeness, this whole area would become busier, and it wouldn’t be safe for me to wander around on my own like this for much longer.
So the following morning, Dave asked Djokin, one of the Bayaka pygmy trackers who worked with him, to accompany me back to the tree for safety. I had developed great respect for Djokin, a quiet, bashful man with sad, knowing eyes and an almost supernatural understanding of the forest. I have never met anyone else so in tune with his environment. His intuitive understanding of the jungle was uncanny, and his ability to detect animals from a great distance, before they could be seen or heard, had helped us avoid many dangerous confrontations in the past. Others from his village had told me of Djokin’s alleged ability to shapeshift: to move through the forest in the guise of an animal, gathering knowledge for the tribe. The Congo can be a mysterious place, so who knows? I like to think it was true.
Djokin and I stepped onto the trail just as it was getting light. My plan was to get back up onto the platform as early as possible. I was curious to see whether the mother and infant chimps would be tempted by the fruit, despite the fact that it still looked green and unpalatable. Nick was arriving in three days, and I wanted to be able to brief him as to how long he’d have to wait to get shots of animals feeding. We walked through the green twilight in silence, Djokin carrying his machete in the crook of his arm while I walked a few steps behind.
After a while he came to an abrupt halt, stopping me with the flat of his machete. He stood perfectly still, staring down the path with wide eyes. “Nzoku,” he whispered, before thrusting his jaw forward with pursed lips to point in the direction of an approaching elephant. I peered through the gloom, but there was nothing there.
For several minutes there was absolute silence and no sign of movement. Then, just as I was beginning to think Djokin was mistaken, I heard the faint hiss of dry leaves on leathery skin, and an enormous bull elephant strode out of the dense undergrowth onto the path less than fifty feet ahead of us. Djokin was gripping my arm tightly, as if to say “Don’t even breathe.” The bull was colossal, weighing around five tons and standing well over nine feet tall. A thin black stripe of hormone dribbled down from a gland behind his eye to show he was in musth, a state of heightened testosterone that makes bulls particularly aggressive and unpredictable. He held his enormous head high, and his long, straight tusks almost touched the ground, their ivory stained deep ocher by the tannins of the forest. A tidemark of orange mud showed where he had been wallowing, and the tassels of hair on the end of his tail were matted with clay.
He was an unbelievably impressive and intimidating animal. But what struck me most was the effortless, almost delicate grace with which he moved. Within two strides he had crossed the path and disappeared back into the thick foliage on the other side. A few seconds later he had vanished completely—swallowed whole by the forest, to leave no more than a faint musky smell in the air and a few footprints the size of steering wheels in the dry earth.
Djokin’s face relaxed into a gentle grin, and I knew the danger had passed. I realized I’d been holding my breath, and now the blood surged through my veins as I exhaled with relief. How on earth had Djokin known it was there so long before it revealed itself? I asked him: he just shrugged and looked away. We waited several more minutes to let the bull put some distance between us before we moved off down the path and got out of there as quickly and quietly as we could.
I had been charged by a forest elephant before and will never forget the gut-wrenching terror of it. The helpless panic of having nowhere to run, of becoming ensnared within a tangle of vines, and of hearing the ear-splitting screams of the enraged animal as it plowed through the forest after me like a tank. I’d been lucky that day. The elephant had passed me by in the chaos, and I’d managed to double back and escape. But it had taught me a valuable lesson. These magnificent beasts are the architects of the forest, establishing and maintaining its shifting trails and clearings, and were to be given a wide berth at all times.
By the time we arrived at the base of the fig tree, the sun was up and the sleeping chimps were gone. Climbing up past their empty nest, I opened the back of my camera hide, checked for snakes, then squeezed in to begin my twelve-hour vigil. Within an hour the honeybees had returned, accompanied by clouds of a smaller stingless variety known as sweat bees. These tiny black insects turn irritation into an art form and soon become insufferable as they crawl into eyes, ears, and nose in search of salt. Insect repellent is useless, so once again I pulled on my head-net.
The next two days slurred past in a smear of languid heat and claustrophobia. Nothing entered the tree to feed on its fruit, and I was left to broil and sweat in solitary confinement. The forest simmered like a pressure cooker, with nothing to mark the passing of time except the mind-grating buzzing of bees and the lethargic, monotonous calls of cicadas. When the heat got too bad and the air too oppressive, I would become lightheaded and pass out into a short, troubled sleep, only to wake a few minutes later with a jolt as I threw my hands out to grab hold of my safety rope, in panic of falling.
Then, the day before Nick arrived, the chimps returned. The first I heard was a soft mewing coming from the branches directly behind my hide. Peeking out through a small tear in the canvas I saw the mother and infant thirty feet away, peering at me through the leaves of a neighboring tree. They knew I was in there and had come back for another look. Half expecting them to settle and make a nest again, I was surprised to suddenly hear a loud scream from a third chimp hidden in the canopy somewhere above. The female shot an anxious look up into the branches before grabbing her infant and climbing away quickly with him on her back.
A moment later my tree shook as the unseen chimp swung across into it. Leafy debris fell onto the roof of my hide, and I felt the unmistakable vibrations and trembles caused by the animal moving around in the branches above me. There was a sharp intake of breath, and the air was filled with noise as the chimp screamed at the top of its lungs before setting the whole tree asway by thrashing its branches. It was a threat display, so this chimp had to be male—probably a high-ranking adult from the female’s own clan. She must have known him well and had clearly read his body language before making herself scarce. He was now really going for it, and my tree lurched erratically as he leapt between the branches. I still couldn’t see him, but my ears were ringing and I fully expected him to crash down through the roof of my hide at any second. Then after one final crescendo, I heard a hollow bang of branches colliding as he climbed across into the fig tree’s canopy, and I was left alone.
Leaning forward to look out of my hide, I watched him walk down one of the fig tree’s enormous fruit-covered limbs. A big adult male in his prime, slightly grizzled but immensely strong and powerful. With hair still bristling from his display, he paused and leaned forward to smell one of the figs. Then, to my amazement, he tenderly squeezed the fruit in his hand without picking it. He was checking its ripeness and seemed to know that to pluck it from the tree prematurely would be to waste a future meal. Continuing along the branch on all fours, occasionally stopping to smell and squeeze other figs, he eventually resigned himself to the fact that nothing was ready. As a light rain began to fall he sat down in the fork of a branch and stretched out a leg to groom himself.
So that was it: undeniable proof that the tree wasn’t quite ready to receive its guests. As the rain fell in pearly sheets, I looked across at the ape sitting with hunched shoulders and an expression of miserable resignation on his craggy face. The grizzled gray of his coat was bejeweled with droplets of water as he sat there motionless, dwarfed by those massive branches. The rain leached color from the scene, and his dark, muscular silhouette blended into a background of muted greens and grays. That image seemed to encapsulate the Congo more than any other.
Three months had passed and I was now in another region of the Congo—a national park called Odzala, containing eight thousand square miles of virgin jungle, unexplored rivers, and impenetrable swamp. Apart from the occasional poacher or scientist, hardly anyone ventured here and for the most part it was left well alone, its thick, tangled forests home to some of the highest densities of elephants and gorillas anywhere in Central Africa. I was working again with Nick for National Geographic.
My first job was to find him a decent tree overlooking one of the forest’s marshy clearings. The plan was to install a canopy platform from which he could photograph animals emerging from the forest to feed in the open below. There were many such clearings, known as bais, dotted through the forest, and some attracted more animals than others. So I’d spent the past few days scouting for options.
Everything had been going well, but today things had taken a turn for the worse and we’d been lost in the jungle for well over seven hours.
Jacques, our local guide, crouched at the base of a tree, keeping watch for elephants, while I tried to come up with a plan for finding our way back to camp. I liked Jacques a lot, but I couldn’t believe the mess we were in. We’d left camp at six that morning to visit a bai known to be good for gorillas. Jacques led the way, but by late morning we still hadn’t arrived and it was obvious something was wrong. His anxiety was easy to read as he darted furtive looks around him. He’d covered his face with his hands and muttered “I don’t know” when asked if we were still heading in the right direction. I’d stared at him in disbelief as it dawned on me that he knew as much as I did, and we were completely lost. We’d been walking for hours and any chance we might have had of backtracking to pick up the correct trail was long gone. To keep walking aimlessly around the jungle like this was to invite disaster. The park was the size of Northern Ireland and still represented only one tiny corner of a mighty forest stretching almost unbroken across the entire African continent. The chances of surviving more than a few nights without a machete, food, first-aid kit, or flashlight were pretty slim. We didn’t even have a compass. To be lost in an urban environment is a temporary inconvenience. To be lost in the world’s second-largest rainforest is cause for serious concern. We were teetering on the edge of a dangerous situation, and I tried to keep calm and come up with a solution, but it wasn’t looking good and the panic was becoming hard to suppress. To be caught out here at nightfall would be an adventure both of us could do without. The forest was crawling with elephants and buffalo. Most of the trees around us had been used as rubbing posts and were smeared with dark-gray mud. It was obvious this was an area of extremely intense animal activity.
Scanning the trees around us, I looked in vain for clues to help us get oriented, but the jungle was just too dense. We were lost in a labyrinth. So out of sheer desperation I decided to free-climb into the canopy without a rope or harness to try to regain our bearings. The chances of my seeing our camp itself were zero, but I might just get lucky and catch a glimpse of a distant wisp of smoke rising up through the trees, or even a river. Any landmark, however tenuous, would be a huge help in our current situation. I needed to get up high and I needed to do it quickly.
The moabi tree in front of me was the biggest in the area, a monolith rising from the soil in a vertical column of dark-brown timber 10 feet wide, its perfectly straight trunk spreading into a broad canopy 150 feet above us. Squinting up into the light, I could see it standing clear above the surrounding forest. The view would be unparalleled if only I could get up there, but without ropes or a harness there was no obvious way. The first branch was way up, and its massive trunk was a living wall of wood without any handholds.
There was, however, a thick, woody vine, a liana, dangling all the way down to the ground from its branches. It wasn’t part of the tree itself, but might just offer a way up. I took a closer look. It was rooted in the soil and emerged to lie flat on the leaf litter like an engorged python before rising up into the moabi’s canopy, where it eventually threw a giant coil over a branch high above us. It was strong—as thick as my thigh—but unstable, swaying like a huge tentacle as I gave it a shake. It would be a tricky climb for sure, but it might just work.
After removing my clumsy wet boots, I placed a bare foot on the liana. Its surface was twisted into a spiral like an enormous ship’s cable, and moss grew between the woody strands. My toes found an easy grip among its coarse ridges, but my skin was tender from too many years in shoes, and it would be slow going. I looked up and felt the acid rise in my stomach. Was I foolish to even try this? Probably, but I was sure it could be done just as long as I took it slowly and thought about each move. Looking back down to the ground, I saw Jacques sitting with his back against a nearby tree, still keeping watch.
The first fifty feet were really tough. The liana dangled in open space away from the tree trunk, like a rope in a school gymnasium. Not a problem when you are twelve years old, but my strength-to-weight ratio wasn’t what it was, and I was too used to climbing with the aid of ropes and clamps to be very proficient at climbing a free-hanging vine. A chimp would have run up it in the blink of an eye, but I was already tiring, and a voice inside my head warned me not to get complacent. There was no safety rope and I still had a long way to go before I could hope to get any view over the surrounding forest.
Despite the risk, though, I was enjoying the freedom of climbing without equipment. It felt great to strip everything back to basics, to channel the energy of my muscles into every move and immerse myself completely in the moment. By wrapping my legs around the liana, I was able to grip with my feet while sliding my hands farther up to gain height. I could then pull myself up with my arms and clamp the liana again between my legs. It was awkward, but seemed to work. The vine was alive with movement as it swayed and rippled in response to my shifting weight. It took every ounce of my strength and concentration to avoid falling. But the liana’s rough texture was easy to grip, and the great strength I felt within its twisted fibers gave me confidence to climb swiftly.
At fifty feet aboveground the vine met the moabi tree and divided in two. One fork looped precariously out into space, while the other continued to rise vertically alongside the tree’s sheer trunk. Taking the latter route, I pushed on, bracing my feet against the moabi while hauling myself up. The liana wobbled and knocked heavily against the trunk, showering me constantly with soil and debris. My skin was crawling with ants, but I couldn’t risk letting go to brush them away. One of them bit my lower-left eyelid and remained latched there, with tiny legs waving in front of my eyeball until I brushed it away with my bicep. Its body came free, leaving the head behind, and I could feel its sharp mandibles every time I blinked.
Eventually, covered in dirt and shaking from the exertion, I made it up to the enormous branch from which the vine hung. This was the tricky bit, and it took a huge amount of strength and balance to edge my leg up and over. I had free-climbed to around 120 feet and reached as far as I could go. The vine now slumped over the branch to sag down into an enormous loop on the other side. The next branch was way out of reach in the canopy above. This was the end of the line, but was I high enough to see anything? With great disappointment I realized I wasn’t. After all that effort and risk I was still within the forest’s dense canopy. The outside world existed as mere glimpses through a tangled curtain of creepers hanging thirty feet away.
The adrenaline was leaving my bones, and I felt tired. It was great to be up here, above the cramped claustrophobia of the forest floor, but it was pointless to stay any longer. We had to find our way back to camp somehow. So while I still had the strength, I lifted my leg over the branch in front of me and twisted my body around to slide back down onto the vine.
Just then I heard a distant flurry of wings, like a flock of waders taking sudden flight along the seashore. Craning my neck around, I caught a flash of crimson through one of the narrow gaps in the canopy. A huge flock of African gray parrots was wheeling over the trees a mile away. I’d only ever seen them flying in pairs, chuntering and whistling to one another on their way to roost in the evening. So to see a thousand swirling in flight together was a sight to lift the soul. I took it as a sign that things would be okay, and as the flock dropped back down below the level of the trees, I realized with a flash of hope that there was probably open ground beneath them. I’d only ever seen them congregate like that at bais, where they landed on the ground to lick minerals from clay. That was it: the clue I’d been looking for. The parrots had shown me which direction we should take.
Yelling down to Jacques, I pointed so that he could remember which direction we should walk in. Wrapping my legs around the rough vine, I slid as fast as I could down past the fork and to the ground. I was drained. My muscles were trembling like jelly, and I was covered in dirt, but things were looking up. Even if the bai wasn’t the one we had set out to find that morning, Jacques might recognize it, and it might lead us to another clue. It had to be worth a go.
Snapping the branches of thin saplings to mark our passage, we set off quickly through the forest. I realized it would take an hour to cover the mile, plenty of time to get lost again. So we stopped regularly to squint back along our trail of broken foliage to be sure we were heading in a straight line.
We soon found ourselves standing in the shadowy eaves of trees, peering out into a sun-blasted space beyond. The air shimmered and clouds of yellow butterflies danced in the midafternoon heat. There was no sign of the parrots, but a small herd of elephants grazed on the far side of the clearing. A very young calf suckled from its mother’s breast, nuzzled up into the gap beneath her front legs. When it wasn’t drinking milk, it was twirling its tiny trunk around and around like a propeller. No more than a few months old, it seemed fascinated by the floppy thing attached to its face.
But what really interested us was the large group of gorillas in the center of the clearing. Sixteen were moving slowly through the grass toward us. They were scattered over a large area, engrossed in eating the roots they pulled up. Several of them were chest-deep in the swamp, and I watched an infant climb up onto a clump of grass and spin around for fun until it got dizzy and fell over. Two adult females were obviously pregnant, and I could see the hulking shape of the silverback on his own off to one side. It was an idyllic scene, but we had to move on if we were to find camp before nightfall.
Water was draining into a series of marshy pools and brooks at the far end of the bai, so we skirted around through the forest until we found the stream they emptied into. From here we headed downstream in the hope of reaching the Mambili River, the major watercourse that we had traveled to get into the park. Even if we emerged onto its banks miles downstream from camp, at least it would lead us home eventually. As luck would have it, we stumbled across a trail just as it was getting dark. It could have been one of a thousand anonymous game paths winding through the forest, but hanging from a vine was a freshly caught electric catfish. Its pallid body was strung up at head height, and I would have walked straight into it if it hadn’t jerked with an audible pulse of electricity as we approached. Another of our team must have caught it in the nearby river and left it there to collect later. Luckily for us he’d forgotten it. Knowing for sure that we were on the right track at last, we unstrung the fish and carried it home for supper.
The Congo is a place of great beauty and wonder, but it can also be extremely tough. A place of extreme highs and terrible lows, and now—several weeks later—I was feeling ground down by a sinister rash that had recently appeared all over my body.
Nick had headed farther up the Mambili River to scout a new photography location, and I’d remained behind on my own to try to sort myself out. It had been raining for two days now, and I’d been stuck in my tent, going slowly mad as the rash became welts that ripened into angry red boils. I was covered in them, ninety in total: all over my legs, crotch, and torso. There were also several on my head. All of them were extremely tender and growing bigger by the hour.
My wet climbing harness hung from the ridgepole above me, going moldy in the rank humidity of my tent. I had intended to rig one more canopy platform for Nick before I left next week, but I could now barely walk, let alone climb a tree. It soon became too painful even to wear clothes, so I spent all day in my underpants, crawling out to lie on my back in the rain whenever the tent’s confines grew too sweaty and claustrophobic. I was entering a downward spiral and knew that I had to get downriver in search of medical attention. But without a canoe, let alone a paddle, I was, so to speak, up shit’s creek. Lying around feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to solve anything, though, so on day three I decided to dig out whatever was hiding in me beneath the mysterious welts.
Selecting a particularly large boil on my thigh, I reached for a sterile syringe and slowly slid its long needle into my flesh. The pain was excruciating, but I was determined to find out what was going on inside the angry welt. I pushed deeper. I’d expected the boil to burst open as I probed, assuming it was some kind of infection that could be cleaned out and treated with antiseptic. But there didn’t seem to be anything inside. I was still no closer to knowing what was happening to me, and now—several hours later—the whole area was inflamed with a creeping red infection. I’d made things worse. So dosing up on heavy antibiotics, I decided to wait until the boils were ripe enough to squeeze properly. Something had to come out of them eventually, even if it was only pus.
The rain continued, and I lay there listening to it on the tent’s flysheet as it grew dark. A few hours later I was woken by something moving beneath the skin of my scalp. At first I thought I’d dreamt it. But a little while later I felt it again: a soft grating on the bone of my skull. There was something squirming around in there. By daybreak I could feel dozens more—whatever they were—wriggling around within the rest of the boils, and the pain was growing unbearable. I had to do something to sort out this crazy situation, but right now I had a more immediate issue to deal with. I’d just squeezed two large spine-covered maggots out of my left testicle. So that was it: botflies. But these two maggots were merely the tip of the iceberg. There were at least ninety more of the little bastards still inside me, growing bigger by the hour. I was not in a happy place.
Thinking back over the past few days, I began to understand what must have happened.
Nick and I had spent the previous week photographing gorillas in a forest clearing. We’d pitched our tents close by, which meant we couldn’t light a fire for fear of scaring the animals away. The forest understory was dark and humid, and without a campfire to dry things out, what got wet stayed wet. I’d been caught in a storm while climbing a tree and stayed soaked and covered in mud for three days. A blizzard of large black flies with bulbous red eyes had found me in the canopy and buzzed around aggressively as I sat on my platform, trying to swat them. I now realized they hadn’t been trying to bite me at all. They’d been laying eggs that must have hatched on my warm, wet clothes, releasing tiny maggots that burrowed unseen into my skin. The grubs were now developing inside me, growing fat on my flesh. As they say, life is nature’s way of keeping meat fresh, and like any other animal I was nothing more than a convenient sack of protein ready to be exploited by anything able to pierce my skin.
So after another dose of antibiotics I took a swig of whiskey and opened the first-aid kit. I’d had enough of the incessant pain as the maggots chewed their way through me, and now that I knew what they were, I’d be damned if I was going to let them grow any fatter at my expense. Determined to bring things to a head, I readied myself to dig them out one by one.
A few hours later I had forty of them pickled in whiskey next to me. I’d swapped the needle for a pair of forceps that I sterilized in the flame of a candle. Some maggots had popped straight out; others had to be dragged out of me piece by piece as I winced with pain and clenched my jaw. There were dozens more across my back and buttocks that I couldn’t reach. Since I was on my own, I’d have to wait until they chewed their way out of me. The pain of them squirming around was now so bad that I couldn’t sleep. The last of my whiskey was gone—probably for the best—and all I could do was sit cross-legged in the rain, staring at the river in the hope that someone would paddle past before too long.
That afternoon I heard an outboard coming upstream. A canoe carrying four guys with Kalashnikovs appeared round the corner, and I ducked down in the grass until I was certain they were park rangers rather than ivory poachers. I had a shouted conversation with them from the riverbank as they passed. They didn’t stop, and who could blame them? It must have been a desperate sight: a naked white bloke covered in sores, standing in the rain, yelling at them in appalling French. They’d looked understandably alarmed, but I was relieved when one of them said they’d send help.
As I sat on the riverbank the following morning, feeling miserable after another sleepless night, a Bayaka pygmy man walked out of the forest toward me. He wore yellow swim shorts and green jelly shoes. At first I thought I was hallucinating, finally losing the plot for good. But without a word he smiled and motioned for me to stand while he opened a small plastic tub of palm oil. He then dabbed the orange fluid over each of my remaining welts. Several had now developed tiny air holes and I realized he was covering these up to suffocate the maggot inside. Once finished, he motioned for me to wait awhile. We sat cross-legged next to each other, looking out over the river in silence for ages before he began squeezing the remaining boils on my back. I heard the satisfying pops as maggot after maggot came out, but I was in too much pain to be happy about it. Stars danced in front of my eyes as I flinched again and again. An hour or so later he had finished, and apart from a few left in my backside, I was now pretty much maggot-free.
The relief was incredible. I was still extremely tender and every movement hurt, but the worst of it was over, and guessing he’d been sent by the park rangers, I thanked him over and over again. He smiled broadly before giving me the tub of oil and walking away. In five seconds he’d disappeared completely, without a word, and melted back into the jungle. I never saw him again, but I will be eternally grateful for his help.
Ten days later I was back in England, lying in the Bristol Royal Infirmary with cerebral malaria. It seemed the Congo had saved the best for last. My brain boiled in a fever of forty-two degrees Celsius as I lay hallucinating in starched white sheets. As far as I was concerned that was it: nothing on earth could drag me back out to Central Africa. Or so I thought.
It was now October. Six months had passed since I’d recovered from malaria and vowed never to return to the Congo. But the lure of the jungle is strong, and there was no way I could turn down the opportunity to film gorillas in the canopy. I’d been invited to join a small team from Scorer, a Bristol company shooting a documentary for the BBC. I joined the team alongside producer Brian, principal cameraman Gavin, and fellow assistant Ralph. A great crew. I was back in the rainforest and loving every minute.
The glow from my watch told me it was just after three in the morning. I was doing my best to choke down a bowl of muesli. We’d run out of powdered milk the previous week, so I poured water over the cereal, gave it a stir, and tucked in. It was far too early, my stomach wasn’t ready for this, but I needed the calories if I was going to get up into the canopy before daybreak. The tree was an hour’s walk away through dense forest, and my filming platform was seventy feet up in its branches. I’d rigged it opposite a huge fruiting tree that we hoped would attract the troop of gorillas we’d been filming. Nineteen of them had nested beneath it the previous evening, so there was a good chance of catching them that morning. I needed to be in the canopy with a camera by 5 a.m., before it got light.
My headlamp cast a pool of weak light onto the table of rough wooden planks in front of me. The shadow of my hand rose and fell mechanically as I shoveled the tasteless cereal down my throat as fast as I could. Turning off my lamp to save batteries while I ate, I looked out into the night. The camp lay bathed in soft moonlight. Trees cast long, crisp shadows over the silver ground, and the jungle was alive with the soft murmur of insects. Someone snored gently in a hut nearby and the world seemed at peace. The hours before dawn have always been my favorite, and I sat still for a few moments to enjoy the serenity.
Raising my rucksack onto my back, I stepped into the moonlight and was just crossing the clearing to enter the forest when I was stopped in my tracks by the deep, rasping call of a leopard. Spinning around to pinpoint the sound, I realized the animal was hidden in the trees on the other side of camp, no more than two hundred feet away. The deep growl echoed through the forest like the rapid strokes of a saw ripping through timber. Feeling exposed and vulnerable in the moonlight, I instinctively edged into the darkness beneath the nearest tree. The leopard must have known I was there, must have heard me moving around camp and seen the flash of my headlamp as I walked through the moonlight toward the shadowy wall of trees. I was pretty sure there was nothing to fear, but I have always had a pretty vivid imagination. I’d read enough tales about man-eating big cats to know full well what a leopard could do. They regularly took full-grown chimps, and a 350-pound adult male gorilla had been killed and eaten by one here not long ago. Trackers had found its eviscerated carcass butchered in the middle of a blood-splattered area of flattened vegetation.
The last roar echoed through the clearing, and everything was silent again, apart from the soft chirring of insects. I stood still, trying to wrestle my imagination under control while deciding what to do. Was it foolish to walk into the forest while a leopard was prowling around, or was I just being paranoid?
It was because of the leopards that most sensible primates slept high in the trees. Everything about leopards is designed for hunting under the velvet cover of night. As a fellow primate, I was just as hardwired as a chimp or a gorilla to fear the darkness, and I felt a strong urge to get up into the safety of the trees as quickly as possible.
This was the first leopard I’d heard, let alone seen. But that didn’t mean they weren’t around us all the time, moving through the trees like ghosts. These forests have one of the highest densities of leopards anywhere in Africa, and I’d had plenty of near encounters in the past. Seen their scats and smelled the acrid scent of their urine. Found saliva fizzing on the half-digested grass they’d coughed up on the trail barely seconds before I’d arrived. But all these incidents had occurred during the day, never at night. No wonder the mother chimp I’d watched all those months ago in the Goualougo had chosen a tall, slender tree for her and her son to spend the night in. The leopard called again, this time from farther away, in the direction opposite to where I was headed. It was moving off, but I’d feel a lot more relaxed once I was up in the canopy.
The darkness beneath the trees was absolute. Dense vegetation pressed in from either side to close in above, and all traces of moonlight disappeared. I turned on my headlamp and followed its bubble of light down the black tunnel ahead of me. The forest here had the thickest, most impenetrable understory I had ever encountered. Huge trees towered above, but down below was a dense monoculture of big-leaved “prayer plants.” Gorillas love the stuff (they eat the shoots), but it’s a nightmare to get through and with visibility no more than ten feet in any direction it would be all too easy to blunder straight into a family group. Such point-blank encounters can be extremely explosive, especially if it elicits a charge from the group’s silverback. But none of the gorillas were sleeping so close to camp that night, so I knew it was safe to hurry along—I had to get up that tree before daybreak.
The tangled foliage seemed to writhe in the shadows around me as I passed down the tunnel behind my bubble of light. I was looking forward to getting safely up the tree and wanted to complete the walk as quickly as possible. Thankfully it was a well-maintained path, and there was little chance of getting lost, but I made a point of stopping at every junction to triple-check that I was still on track.
It was while standing at one such fork in the trail that I heard the leopard again. This time from less than fifty feet ahead of me. I froze, rooted to the spot, straining my eyes to penetrate the inky blackness beyond my headlamp’s light. I’d been walking for half an hour and was over a mile from camp in the opposite direction from where I’d last heard the animal. Was it the same leopard? It was impossible to tell, but either way somewhere close, on the trail in front of me, was a big cat, and I knew it could see me standing in my pool of light. The hairs on my neck stood up and my heart beat loudly in the silence of the seconds that followed.
I glanced at my watch: 4 a.m. I had an hour left before daybreak to get up into the tree, ready to film. My instinct was to turn the lamp off, slink away, and hide in the shadows. But what good would that do? Leopards can see through the darkest night. In a desperate display of defense I opened the blade of my pocketknife, but it isn’t a leopard’s style to make an exposed frontal attack. There would be no warning. I thought of the chimp sleeping safely aboveground with her infant.
After a few tense minutes I again heard it calling from farther away, this time from within the dense foliage to my right. It was skirting around—unless I had blundered between two different animals, of course. Whatever the case, I made a supreme effort to calm my nerves and started moving slowly forward again.
Another fifteen minutes passed and I had the platform tree in my sights. I took my headlamp off and muffled its beam with my fingers. Nineteen gorillas were asleep in their nests somewhere close by, and I didn’t want to wake them. But neither did I want to blunder into Apollo, the group’s four-hundred-pound silverback, in the dark. So, allowing a faint sliver of light to escape between my fingers, I inched my way down the last hundred feet of track. The air was thick with the sweet, musky smell of gorillas—they were very close, and I took my time to avoid stepping on twigs as I crept along.
Arriving at the tree, I reached out for the white rope hanging in front of me. Suddenly all the hairs on my neck stood up and my skin crawled. Spinning around, I saw a low black shadow slink away into my peripheral vision. My body tensed and I strained my eyes to see what it was. But it had gone—melting away like oil into the darkness beyond. My heart was beating in my throat and my nerves felt tight enough to snap. Had I really just seen it? Had the leopard really followed me here?
My need to keep watch for the cat overruled any desire to hide from gorillas, so I uncovered my headlamp and, keeping my back to the tree, shone the light down the trail while I hurriedly pulled on my harness. Fear was making me fumble and my foot got caught in the leg loops, nearly tripping me. The carabiners jangled noisily as I wrestled the harness up onto my waist. My heart was thumping and my imagination was running wild. Reluctantly turning around to face the tree, I clipped into the ropes and started to climb as quickly as I could.
I felt hopelessly vulnerable with my back to the darkness, but the feeling of safety I got from being in the tree was immediate. Once above twenty feet, I began to relax and collect my scattered nerves. Turning off my headlamp, I sat back in my harness and took a deep breath.
The forest looked astonishingly beautiful from up here, a shadowland of misty blues and pale greens. The three-quarter moon was low in the west and its light slanted in through the canopy to dapple the scene with silver. I looked down into the darkness, to where the trunk disappeared into the shadows of the thick understory. It was a relief to be free from its creeping claustrophobia, to be beyond any threat. I was pretty sure the leopard had followed me out of nothing more sinister than curiosity. I can’t imagine it had ever seen a human wandering around the forest at night before, and I don’t suppose it ever intended to attack. But millions of years of instinct are hard to suppress. Every one of us alive today is only here because one of our ancestors listened to their instincts when it mattered most. Evolution hammered that intangible sixth sense into us for very good reason.
Looking up the trunk, I could see the square silhouette of the platform high above. It was almost 5 a.m. and the moon was setting. Arriving at the platform, I squeezed into my hide and hauled up the rucksack containing the camera.
By 5:15 I was settled and looking out through the front of my canvas tent toward the fruiting tree. Its massive trunk lay in dense shadow beneath the wide canopy spreading above. A few minutes later I heard the faint snapping of foliage and could see the dense understory below me sway as something moved through it unseen. A soft squeal from an infant, followed by the deep grunt of an adult, told me the gorillas had arrived. Nineteen of them were on the move, passing right beneath my platform. But all I could see was a moving ripple of foliage as they headed toward the fruiting tree.
Mist began to rise up through the canopy and the early rays of sun brought color to the scene. The first gorilla to emerge from the undergrowth was a female. She climbed a vine to enter the tree where it forked into three at the top of its trunk. Moving higher into the canopy, she was immediately followed by two more who took exactly the same route. These were then followed by another female with her tiny newborn baby on her front. Then came Apollo, the silverback.
He was at least twice the size of the females, and his broad back shone in the early morning sunlight. Grasping the vine with huge hands and feet, he climbed slowly with great deliberation. The muscles in his back flexed like corrugated iron as his enormous black arms hauled him up with effortless ease. He was more than twice the weight of an adult male orangutan, and to see an animal of such size and bulk climb with such dexterity was incredible.
By now the females were much higher up in the misty canopy, sitting to warm their bones in the sun’s horizontal rays as they foraged for fruit. Apollo was followed by a couple of youngsters, more interested in playing on the vines than feeding. About half the group was now up in the tree and I noticed how respectful they were to one another while climbing. Each individual was given space to go where it wanted, and females were constantly shifting to allow others to pass by safely. Compared to the mass hysteria displayed by chimps, the gorillas seemed incredibly polite and organized in their approach to foraging.
Apollo was too big and heavy to access the outer reaches of the canopy, so stayed within the center of the crown, where he snapped off branches to bring fruit within easy reach. Resting the branch on his enormous belly, he’d sit there picking only the ripest morsels before dropping the branch out of the tree and reaching for another. The tree was full of gorillas foraging peacefully for their breakfast. The only noise I heard was a short scream from one of the females, which made Apollo stand up on all fours and posture with a tense expression of tight-lipped annoyance. But a few seconds later he sat back down to resume breakfast and all was again quiet, apart from a soft chorus of satisfied belches and the constant smacking of lips.
After half an hour or so, Apollo began to climb down. Once again I was amazed by how civilized the gorillas were as the rest of the group followed him down from the higher branches in a peaceful, orderly manner.
Cogs whirred softly in my right ear as film raced smoothly through the camera’s shutter. The film ran out just as the two youngsters dropped back down into the dense understory. The tree still had plenty of fruit left in its branches, but for now the gorillas had moved off in search of other food. They clearly enjoyed a very balanced diet. I remained on the platform all day, but never saw them again.
Apollo’s group had been habituated to human presence by Magdalena Bermejo, a Spanish primatologist and world authority on western lowland gorillas. No one had ever managed to habituate lowland gorillas before. Two years later an outbreak of Ebola ripped through the heart of the area, killing 130 of the 143 known gorillas in just four months. Apollo and his entire family—including a newborn baby named James—succumbed, and it is with great fondness that I recall those special moments spent alongside them in the canopy. It had taken Magdalena and her husband seven years of relentless hard work and determination to get to know the gorillas, and I can only imagine what they must have gone through during those horrendous four months.
With the coming of the virus, something amazing had been lost to the world forever. I do not know the species of the enormous, beautiful tree in which I watched the gorillas feed. But it seems fitting that it should be remembered here as Apollo.