Last Chance to See

big old photocopiers on them, and once or twice I was hailed by a street hustler and asked if I wanted to have something photocopied or sleep with his sister. I returned to the hotel, wrote some notes on the writing paper, which for some reason was pink, and slept as if I were dead.
    The following morning we flew to the town of Goma. Here we discovered that even when making internal flights in Zaïre you still had to go through the full rigmarole of immigration and customs controls all over again. We were held under armed guard while a large and thuggish airport officialinterrogated us in his office as to why we hadn’t acquired any currency-declaration forms at Bukavu.
    The fact that they hadn’t had any currency-declaration forms to give us at Bukavu cut no ice with him.
    “Fifty dollars,” he said.
    His office was large and bare and contained just one small desk with two sheets of paper in a drawer. He leaned back and stared at the ceiling, which had obviously seen a lot of this sort of thing going on. Then he leaned forward again and pulled the palms of his hands slowly down over his face as if he were trying to peel it off. He said again, “Fifty dollars. Each,” and then stared idly at the corner of his desk and rolled a pencil slowly in his fingers. We were subjected to an hour of this before he finally tired of our appalling French and let us go. We hadn’t paid.
    We emerged blinking from the airport and, miraculously, met up with the driver whom some friends of Mark’s had arranged to take us up into the Virunga volcanoes, where the mountain gorillas lived.
    The gorillas were not the animals we had come to Zaïre to look for. It is very hard, however, to come all the way to Zaïre and not go and see them. I was going to say that this is because they are our closest living relatives, but I’m not sure that that’s an appropriate reason. Generally, in my experience, when you visit a country in which you have any relatives living there’s a tendency to want to lie low and hope they don’t find out you’re in town. At least with the gorillas, you know that there’s no danger of having to go out to dinner with them and catch up on several million years of family history, so you can visit them with impunity. They are, of course, only collateral relatives—
n
th cousins,
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times removed. We are both descended from a common ancestor, who is, sadly, no longer with us, and who has, since Darwin’s day, been the subject of endless speculation as to what manner of creature he/she was.
    The section of the primate family of which we are members(rich, successful members of the family, the ones who made good and who should, by any standards, be looking after the other, less well-off members of the family) are the great apes. We do not actually call ourselves great apes, though. Like many of the immigrants at Ellis Island, we have changed our names. The family we call the great apes includes the gorillas (of which there are three sub-species: mountain, eastern lowland, and western lowland), two species of chimpanzee, and the orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra. We do not like to include ourselves in it—in fact the classification “great apes” was originally created specifically to drive a wedge between us and them. And yet it is now widely accepted that the gorillas and chimpanzees separated from us on the evolutionary tree more recently than they did from other great apes. This would mean that the gorillas are more closely related to us than they are to the orangutans. Any classification which includes gorillas and orangutans must therefore include us as well. One way or another, we and the gorillas are very, very close relatives indeed—almost as close to each other as the Indian elephant and the African elephant, which also share a common, extinct ancestor.
    The Virunga volcanoes, where the mountain gorillas live, straddle the border of Zaïre, Rwanda, and Uganda. There are about 280 gorillas there, roughly two-thirds of which live in Zaïre, and the other third in Rwanda. I say roughly, because the gorillas are not yet sufficiently advanced in evolutionary terms to have discovered the benefits of passports, currency-declaration forms, and official bribery, and therefore tend to wander backward and forward across the border as and when their beastly, primitive whim takes them. A few stragglers even pop over into Uganda from time to time, but there are no gorillas actually living there as permanent