11. And the truth is he was wonderful. He was a huge shining male, half crouching, half standing, his mighty arms akimbo. I had not been prepared for the blackness of him; he was a great craggy pillar of gleaming blackness, black crew-cut hair on his head, black deep-sunken eyes glaring towards us, huge rubbery black nostrils and a black beard. He shifted his posture a little, still glaring fixedly upon us, and he had the dignity and majesty of prophets. He was the most distinguished and splendid animal I ever saw and I had only one desire at that moment: to go forward towards him, to meet him and to know him: to communicate. This experience (and I am by no means the only one to feel it in the presence of a gorilla) is utterly at variance with one's reactions to all other large wild animals in Africa. If the lion roars, if you get too close to an elephant and he fans out his ears, if the rhinoceros lowers his head and turns in your direction, you have, if you are unarmed and even sometimes if you are, just one impulse and that is to run away. The beast you feel is savage, intrinsically hostile, basically a murderer. But with the gorilla there is an instant sense of recognition. You might be badly frightened, but in the end you feel you will be able to make some gesture, utter some sound, that the animal will recognize and understand. At all events you do not have the same instinct to turn and bolt.
     12. Afterwards I remembered another thing. Normally, when you come up against a rare wild animal in Africa, you grab your binoculars or your camera at once. It is a simple reflex action. This gorilla was thirty yards away and divided from us by tangled undergrowth and might not perhaps have made a very good photograph, but we could certainly have seen him more clearly through glasses. Yet none of us moved. In my own case (and I suspect in the case of my friend as well) I felt that there was not a second to be lost of this contact, not even the few instants required to put the binoculars to my eyes. I wanted to see him naturally and I wanted to see him whole.