4. Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state, no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which it lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions to these volcanoes in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried here among the animals he loved so well. But even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.
    5. The little that is known about gorillas certainly makes you want to know a great deal more. Sir Julian Huxley has recorded that thrice in the London Zoo he saw an eighteen-month-old specimen trace the outline of its own shadow with its finger. "No similar artistic initiative," he writes, "has been recorded for any other anthropoid, though we all know now that young chimpanzees will paint 'pictures' if provided with the necessary materials." Huxley speaks too of a traveller seeing a male gorilla help a female up a steep rock-step on Mount Muhavura, and gallantry of that kind is certainly not normal among animals. It is this" human-ness" of the gorilla which is so beguiling. According to some observers he courts and makes love in the same way that humans do. Once the family is established it clings together. It feeds in a group in the thick bamboo jungles on the mountainside in the daytime, each animal making a tidy pile of its food -- wild celery, bamboo shoots and other leaves -- and squatting down to eat it; and by night each member of the family makes its own bed by bending over and interlacing the bamboo fronds so as to form a kind of oval-shaped nest which is as comfortable and springy as a mattress. The father tends to make his bed just a foot or two from the ground, the mother a little higher, and the children (perhaps two or three of them) safely lodged in the branches up above.