1. Just south of the equator, in the extreme south-western corner of Uganda, a chain of eight volcanoes rises to a height of 15 000 feet and straggles in a ragged line across the border into the Belgian Congo. This is one of the more grandiose spectacles in Central Africa, and it is in many ways a strange and disturbing place. Approaching it from the Uganda side you emerge quite suddenly on to the crest of a mountain pass, and there, all at once, the scene breaks out before you with the theatricality of a curtain lifted from a stage. Mount Muhavura, the first of the volcanoes, is a perfect cone with thick green jungle on its sides, and beyond this one glimpses the outlines of other, loftier peaks, usually with their tops neatly cut off by a bank of heavy cloud. The last two volcanoes on the Congo side are still active, and all the floor of the valley below them is dotted with black forbidding patches of lava. This is a region of landslides and earth tremors and nothing seems secure. Indeed, in recent years still another volcano has burst out of a stretch of level plain and has now risen to a height of six hundred feet.
     2. For the most part the local African tribesmen live in a damp soporific heat around the lakes at the foot of the volcanoes, and they seldom go up into the cold jungles and the cloudy heights above; that area, the temperate and sub-alpine zone, has become the refuge of one of the rarest of all wild animals in Africa, the mountain gorilla.
     3. The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured and imprisoned in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) link with our ancestral past.