3. I remember Baumgartel telling me that at this height elephants, leopards and hyenas roamed about as well as the gorilla, but I could see no sign of movement anywhere along the mountain slopes, and in the sky only the long circular sweeps of the eagles sailing by. The silence seemed absolute.
     4. Presently, when my companion and I had gathered our breath a little, the guides indicated that we must go on again. This, for me, had I only known it, was where the impossible began. Hitherto we had at least proceeded on our feet in an upright position. Now we headed into a thick scrub of mingled bamboo and hypericum trees and often the only possible method of getting ahead was on all fours like a gorilla. The guides would not at this stage cut us a path with their pangas lest the noise should alarm the animals, and so it was necessary to haul oneself bodily through the undergrowth, and always we kept going upward.
     5. By midday we had passed the ten thousand foot mark, but I am not really able to recall the incidents of these hours, for red lights had long since begun to dance in front of my eyes and however quickly I gasped for breath it never seemed possible to get enough air into my lungs. The guides kept casting about in different directions and disappearing into the scrub, but then they would call to one another with an insistent bell-like whistle and that was the only sound l heard except for the noise created by my own beastly wallowing in the thickets. We seemed to be following some sort of a trail, since I saw gorilla droppings on the ground at intervals, and finally we came up with a group of their nests. There they all were, the big ones and the little ones, exactly as they had been described. I had an impulse to climb up and try one of those springy beds, but that would have meant using up more energy when I had none to spare, and anyway the nests were fouled with droppings. I stared dully at a little pile of shavings on the ground; obviously a gorilla had sat here peeling the bark off a twig before he ate it, and I looked at one of the guides interrogatively. But he shook his head. This was an old nesting place and the gorilla family had long since moved on. We started our crawling climb again.