Congo Page 22

  Gorillas nice to Amy?

  With a smug look: Yes.

  Amy tell Peter.

  She stared off into the distance, not answering.

  To catch her attention Elliot snapped his fingers. She turned to him slowly, her expression bored.

  Amy tell Peter, Amy stay gorillas?

  Yes.

  In her indifference was the clear recognition that Elliot was desperate to learn what she knew. Amy was always very astute at recognizing when she had the upper hand—and she had it now.

  Amy tell Peter, he signed as calmly as he could.

  Good gorillas like Amy Amy good gorilla.

  That told him nothing at all. She was composing phrases by rote: another way of ignoring him.

  Amy.

  She glanced at him.

  Amy tell Peter. Amy come see gorillas?

  Yes.

  Gorillas do what?

  Gorillas sniff Amy.

  All gorillas?

  Big gorillas white back gorillas sniff Amy baby sniff Amy all gorillas sniff gorillas like Amy.

  So silverback males had sniffed her, then infants, then all the members of the troop. That much was clear—remarkably clear, he thought, making a mental note of her extended syntax. Afterward had she been accepted in the troop? He signed, What happen Amy then?

  Gorillas give food.

  What food?

  No name Amy food give food.

  Apparently they had shown her food. Or had they actually fed her? Such a thing had never been reported in the wild, but then no one had ever witnessed the introduction of a new animal into a troop. She was a female, and nearly of productive age.

  What gorillas give food?

  All give food Amy take food Amy like.

  Apparently it was not males, or males exclusively. But what had caused her acceptance? Granted that gorilla troops were not as closed to outsiders as monkey troops—what actually had happened?

  Amy stay with gorillas?

  Gorillas like Amy.

  Yes. What Amy do?

  Amy sleep Amy eat Amy live gorillas gorillas good gorillas Amy like.

  So she had joined in the life of the troop, living the daily existence. Had she been totally accepted?

  Amy like gorillas?

  Gorillas dumb.

  Why dumb?

  Gorillas no talk.

  No talk sign talk?

  Gorillas no talk.

  Evidently she had experienced frustration with the gorillas because they did not know her sign language. (Language using primates were commonly frustrated and annoyed when thrown among animals who did not understand the signs.)

  Gorillas nice to Amy?

  Gorillas like Amy Amy like gorillas like Amy like gorillas.

  Why Amy come back?

  Want milk cookies.

  “Amy,” he said, “you know we don’t have any damn milk or cookies.” His sudden verbalization startled the others. They looked questioningly at Amy.

  For a long time she did not answer. Amy like Peter. Amy sad want Peter.

  He felt like crying.

  Peter good human person.

  Blinking his eyes he signed, Peter tickle Amy. She jumped into his arms.

  Later, he questioned her in more detail. But it was a painstakingly slow process, chiefly because of Amy’s difficulty in handling concepts of time.

  Amy distinguished past, present, and future—she remembered previous events, and anticipated future promises—but the Project Amy staff had never succeeded in teaching her exact differentiations. She did not, for example, distinguish yesterday from the day before. Whether this reflected a failing in teaching methods or an innate feature of Amy’s conceptual world was an open question. (There was evidence for a conceptual difference. Amy was particularly perplexed by spatial metaphors for time, such as “that’s behind us” or “that’s coming up.” Her trainers conceived of the past as behind them and the future ahead. But Amy’s behavior seemed to indicate that she conceived of the past as in front of her—because she could see it—and the future behind her— because it was still invisible. Whenever she was impatient for the promised arrival of a friend, she repeatedly looked over her shoulder, even if she was facing the door.)

  In any case, the time problem was a difficulty in talking to her now, and Elliot phrased his questions carefully. He asked, “Amy, what happened at night? With the gorillas?”

  She gave him the look she always gave him when she thought a question was obvious. Amy sleep night.

  “And the other gorillas?” Gorillas sleep night.

  “All the gorillas?” She disdained to answer.

  “Amy,” he said, “gorillas come to our camp at night.” Come this place?

  “Yes, this place. Gorillas come at night.”

  She thought that over. No. Munro said, “What did she say?”

  Elliot said, “She said ‘No.’ Yes, Amy, they come.”

  She was silent a moment, and then she signed, Things come.

  Munro again asked what she had said.

  “She said, ‘Things come.’ “ Elliot translated the rest of her responses for them.

  Ross asked, “What things, Amy?”

  Bad things.

  Munro said, “Were they gorillas, Amy?”

  Not gorillas. Bad things. Many bad things come forest come. Breath talk. Come night come.

  Munro said, “Where are they now, Amy?”

  Amy looked around at the jungle. Here. This bad old place things come.

  Ross said, “What things, Amy? Are they animals?” Elliot told them that Amy could not abstract the category “animals.” “She thinks people are animals,” he explained. “Are the bad things people, Amy? Are they human persons?”

  No.

  Munro said, “Monkeys?”

  No. Bad things. not sleep night.

  Munro said, “Is she reliable?”

  What means?

  “Yes,” Elliot said. “Perfectly.”

  “She knows what gorillas are?”

  Amy good gorilla, she signed.

  “Yes, you are,” Elliot said. “She’s saying she’s a good gorilla.”

  Munro frowned. “So she knows what gorillas are, but she says these things are not gorillas?”

  “That’s what she says.”

  2. Missing Elements

  ELLIOT GOT ROSS TO SET UP THE VIDEO CAMERA AT the outskirts of the city, facing the campsite. With the videotape running he led Amy to the edge of the camp to look at the ruined buildings. Elliot wanted to confront Amy with the lost city, the reality behind her dreams—and he wanted a record of her responses to that moment. What happened was totally unexpected.

  Amy had no reaction at all.

  Her face remained impassive, her body relaxed. She did not sign. If anything she gave the impression of boredom, of suffering through another of Elliot’s enthusiasms that she did not share. Elliot watched her carefully. She wasn’t displacing; she wasn’t repressing; she wasn’t doing anything. She stared at the city with equanimity.

  “Amy know this place?”

  Yes.

  “Amy tell Peter what place.” Bad place old place.

  “Sleep pictures?” This bad place.

  “Why is it bad, Amy?”

  Bad place old place.

  “Yes, but why, Amy?” Amy fear.

  She showed no somatic indication of fear. Squatting on the ground alongside him she gazed forward, perfectly calm.

  “Why Amy fear?”

  Amy want eat.

  “Why Amy fear?”

  She would not answer, in the way that she did not deign to answer him whenever she was completely bored; he could not provoke her to discuss her dreams further. She was as closed on the subject as she had been in San Francisco. When he asked her to accompany them into the ruins, she calmly refused to do so. On the other hand, she did not seem distressed that Elliot was going into the city, and she cheerfully waved goodbye before going to demand more food from Kahega.

  Only afte
r the expedition was concluded and Elliot had returned to Berkeley did he find the explanation to this perplexing event—in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, first published in 1887.

  It may happen on rare occasions that a patient may be confronted by the reality behind his dreams. Whether a physical edifice, a person, or a situation that has the tenor of deep familiarity, the subjective response of the dreamer is uniformly the same. The emotive content held in the dream—whether frightening, pleasurable, or mysterious— is drained away upon sight of the reality. . . . We may be certain that the apparent boredom of the subject does not prove the dream-content is false. Boredom may be most strongly felt when the dream-content is real. The subject recognizes on some deep level his inability to alter the conditions that he feels, and so finds himself overcome by fatigue, boredom, and indifference, to conceal from him his fundamental helplessness in the face of a genuine problem which must be rectified.

  Months later, Elliot would conclude that Amy’s bland reaction only indicated the depth of her feeling, and that Freud’s analysis was correct; it protected her from a situation that had to be changed, but that Amy felt powerless to alter, especially considering whatever infantile memories remained from the traumatic death of her mother.

  Yet at the time, Elliot felt disappointment with Amy’s neutrality. Of all the possible reactions he had imagined when he first set out for the Congo, boredom was the least expected, and he utterly failed to grasp its significance—that the city of Zinj was so fraught with danger that Amy felt obliged in her own mind to push it aside, and to ignore it.

  Elliot, Munro, and Ross spent a hot, difficult morning hacking their way through the dense bamboo and the clinging, tearing vines of secondary jungle growth to reach new buildings in the heart of the city. By midday, their efforts were rewarded as they entered structures unlike any they had seen before. These buildings were impressively engineered, enclosing vast cavernous spaces descending three and four stories beneath the ground.

  Ross was delighted by the underground constructions, for it proved to her that the Zinj people had evolved the technology to dig into the earth, as was necessary fur diamond mines. Munro expressed a similar view: “These people,” he said, “could do anything with earthworks.”

  Despite their enthusiasm, they found nothing of interest in the depths of the city. They ascended to higher levels later in the day, coming upon a building so filled with reliefs that they termed it “the gallery.” With the video camera hooked to the satellite linkup, they examined the pictures in the gallery.

  These showed aspects of ordinary city life. There were domestic scenes of women cooking around fires, children playing a ball game with sticks, scribes squatting on the ground as they kept records on clay tablets. A whole wall of hunting scenes, the men in brief loincloths, armed with spears. And finally scenes of mining, men carrying baskets of stones from tunnels in the earth.

  in this rich panorama, they noticed certain missing elements. The people of Zinj had dogs, used for hunting, and a variety of civet cat, kept as household pets—yet it had apparently never occurred to them to use animals as beasts of burden. All manual labor was done by human slaves. And they apparently never discovered the wheel for there were no carts or rolling vehicles. Everything was carried by hand in baskets.

  Munro looked at the pictures for a long time and finally said, “Something else is missing.”

  They were looking at a scene from the diamond mines, the dark pits in the ground from which men emerged carrying baskets heaped with gems.

  “Of course!” Munro said, snapping his fingers. “No police!’’

  Elliot suppressed a smile: he considered it only too predictable that a character like Munro would wonder about police in this long-dead society.

  But Munro insisted his observation was significant. “Look here,” he said. “This city existed because of its diamond mines. It had no other reason for being, out here in the jungle. Zinj was a mining civilization—its wealth, its trade, its daily life, everything depended upon mining. It was a classic one-crop economy—and yet they didn’t guard it, didn’t regulate it, didn’t control it?”

  Elliot said, “There are other things we haven’t seen— pictures of people eating, for example. Perhaps it was taboo to show the guards.”

  “Perhaps,” Munro said, unconvinced. “But in every other mining complex in the world guards are ostentatiously prominent, as proof of control. Go to the South African diamond mines or the Bolivian emerald mines and the first thing you are made aware of is the security. But here,” he said, pointing to the reliefs, “there are no guards.”

  Karen Ross suggested that perhaps they didn’t need guards, perhaps the Zinjian society was orderly and peaceful. “After all, it was a long time ago,” she said.

  “Human nature doesn’t change,” Munro insisted:

  When they left the gallery, they came to an open courtyard, overgrown with tangled vines. The courtyard had a formal quality, heightened by the pillars of a temple-like building to one side. Their attention was immediately drawn to the courtyard floor. Strewn across the ground were dozens of stone paddles, of the kind Elliot had previously found.

  “I’ll be damned,” Elliot said. They picked their way through this field of paddles, and entered the building they came to call “the temple.”

  It consisted of a single large square room. The ceiling had been broken in several places, and hazy shafts of sunlight filtered down. Directly ahead, they saw an enormous mound of vines perhaps ten feet high, a pyramid of vegetation. Then they recognized it was a statue.

  Elliot climbed up on the statue and began stripping away the clinging foliage. It was hard work; the creepers had dug tenaciously into the stone. He glanced back at Munro. “Better?”

  “Come and look,” Munro said, with an odd expression on his face.

  Elliot climbed down, stepped back to look. Although the statue was pitted and discolored, he could clearly see an enormous standing gorilla, the face fierce, the arms stretched wide. In each hand, the gorilla held stone paddles like cymbals, ready to swing them together.

  “My God,” Peter Elliot said.

  “Gorilla,” Munro said with satisfaction.

  Ross said, “It’s all clear now. These people worshiped gorillas. It was their religion.”

  “But why would Amy say they weren’t gorillas?”

  “Ask her,” Munro said, glancing at his watch. “I have to get us ready for tonight.”

  3. Attack

  THEY DUG A MOAT OUTSIDE THE PERIMETER FENCE with collapsible metalloid shovels. The work continued long after sundown; they were obliged to turn on the red night lights while they filled the moat with water diverted from the nearby stream. Ross considered the moat a trivial obstacle— it was only a few inches deep and a foot wide. A man could step easily across it. In reply, Munro stood outside the moat and said, “Amy, come here, I’ll tickle you.”

  With a delighted grunt, Amy came bounding toward him, but stopped abruptly on the other side of the water. “Come on, I’ll tickle you,” Munro said again, holding out his arms. “Come on, girl.”

  Still she would not cross. She signed irritably; Munro stepped over and lifted her across. “Gorillas hate water,” he told Ross. “I’ve seen them refuse to cross a stream smaller than this.” Amy was reaching up and scratching under his arms, then pointing to herself. The meaning was perfectly clear. “Women,” Munro sighed, and bent over and tickled her vigorously. Amy rolled on the ground, grunting and snuffling and smiling broadly. When he stopped, she lay expectantly on the ground, waiting for more.

  “That’s all,” Munro said.

  She signed to him.

  “Sorry, I don’t understand. No,” he laughed, “signing slower doesn’t help.” And then he understood what she wanted, and he carried her back across the moat again, into the camp. She kissed him wetly on the cheek.

  “Better watch your monkey,” Munro said to Elliot as he sat down to dinner. He continued in this light ba
ntering fashion, aware of the need to loosen everybody up; they were all nervous, crouching around the fire. But when the dinner was finished, and Kahega was off setting out the ammunition and checking the guns, Munro took Elliot aside and said, “Chain her in your tent. If we start shooting tonight, I’d hate to have her running around in the dark. Some of the lads may not be too particular about telling one gorilla from another. Explain to her that it may get very noisy from the guns but she should not be frightened.”

  “Is it going to get very noisy?” Elliot said.

  “I imagine,” Munro said.

  He took Amy into his tent and put on the sturdy chain leash she often wore in California. He tied one end to his cot, but it was a symbolic gesture; Amy could move it easily if she chose to. He made her promise to stay in the tent.

  She promised. He stepped to the tent entrance, and she signed, Amy like Peter.

  “Peter like Amy,” he said, smiling. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He emerged into another world.

  The red night lights had been doused, but in the flickering glow of the campfire he saw the goggle-eyed sentries in position around the compound. With the low throbbing pulse of the electrified fence, this sight created an unearthly atmosphere. Peter Elliot suddenly sensed the precariousness of their position—a handful of frightened people deep in the Congo rain forest, more than two hundred miles from the nearest human habitation.

  Waiting.

  He tripped over a black cable on the ground. Then he saw a network of cables, snaking over the compound, running to the guns of each sentry. He noticed then that the guns had an unfamiliar shape—they were somehow too slender, too insubstantial and that the black cables ran from the guns to squat, snub-nosed mechanisms mounted on short tripods at Intervals around the camp.

  He saw Ross near the fire, setting up the tape recorder.