Last Chance to See - Douglas Adams [32]
Then they said they were going to bed for the night, only they weren’t going to sleep in the hut because they had a tent with them, which was much better. It was a German tent. They nodded us a curt good night and left.
In bed that night, after I had lain awake for a while worrying about Murara and Serundori’s casual propensity for shooting people, I turned to worrying instead about Helmut and Kurt. If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn’t been German. It was too easy. Too obvious. It was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoke a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script. If Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes. I wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.
Mark had told me before we went to bed that when I woke up the first thing I had to remember was to turn my boots upside-down and shake them.
I asked him why.
“Scorpions,” he replied. “Good night.”
Early in the morning Murara and Serundori were waiting at the hut door fondling their rifles and machetes, and wearing meaningful glints in their eyes that we weren’t at all certain we liked. However, they had good news for us. Since gorillas tend not to make their personal arrangements to suit the convenience of visiting collateral relatives, they were sometimes to be found up to eight hours’ trek away from the visitors’ hut. Today, however, the news was that they were only about an hour’s distance from us, so we would have an easy day of it. We gathered together our gorilla-watching gear, carefully leaving behind the aftershave, the Dickens, and also our flash guns, on the assumption that these were all things that would, to differing degrees, upset the gorillas, said good morning to Helmut and Kurt, who were joining us for the expedition, and set off together in search of the gorillas. Ahead of us through the misty morning light reared the hump of Mikeno volcano.
The forest we plunged into was thick and wet and I complained about this to Mark.
He explained that gorillas like to live in montane rain forest, or cloud forest. It was over ten thousand feet above sea level, above the cloud level, and always damp. Water drips off the trees the whole time.
“It’s not at all like lowland primary rain forest,” said Mark, “more like secondary rain forest, which is what you get when primary forest is burnt or cut down and then starts to regenerate.”
“I thought that the whole problem with rain forest was that it wouldn’t grow again when you cut it down,” I said.
“You won’t get primary rain forest again, of course. Well, you might get something similar over hundreds or thousands of years, we don’t know. Certainly all of the original wildlife will have been lost for good. But what grows in the short term is secondary rain forest, which is far less rich and complex.
“Primary rain forest is an incredibly complex system, but when you’re actually standing in it it looks half empty. In its mature state you get a very high, thick canopy of leaves, because of all the trees competing with each other to get at the sunlight. But since little light penetrates this canopy there will tend to be very