Gorilla Hunting 



few stiffened porters from their beds of heather and started 

 to mount the last thousand feet that separated us from the 

 summit, carrying a box of food, a bundle of wood, the cameras 

 and collecting outfit, a rifle and a bottle of brandy. 



Half an hour's climbing brought us out on the bare lava 

 where the vegetation practically ceases, enabling us to 

 appreciate the splendid spectacle of the sun about to rise 

 behind the clear-cut peaks of Karisimbi and Mikeno. Although 

 the bases of these giants were swathed in empurpled mist, 

 their snow-sprinkled summits stood out finely in the rosy 

 dawn without a cloud to mar their beauty — save only as an 

 added charm a pink umbrella of vapour, a misty halo, that 

 lay just resting above the tip of Karisimbi. Then, too, 

 as if Dame Nature had said : " I have something to show you, 

 just this once," the moon in its last quarter and Venus, the 

 Morning Star, hung close together above the fairy scene. 

 Enchanted scenery, as it might be, from some other world. 



Another world too greeted our gaze as, after reaching 

 the summit, we peered over the edge and into the Ninagongo 

 crater. For there, six or seven hundred feet sheer below, 

 lay a vast and steaming pit, a world of Titans and unknown 

 forces at work in the bowels of the earth, beside which one 

 feels a puny atom. The crater, the crater-floor and the 

 oval eruptive shaft might have been laid out by some master- 

 builder, so symmetrical do they appear to be. The crater- 

 floor, which approximates a mile in diameter, is perfectly flat 

 and seems to be covered with yellow sand, but which in 

 reality is pulverized lava. In the centre of this is the immense 

 smoking vent, or eruptive shaft, surrounded by semi-circular 

 cracks, running parallel to its edge, and which emit a heavy 

 white vapour, the smoke from the vent itself being pale yellow 



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