Dinosaurs in the Attic (15 page)

Upon his recovery and return from Africa with the elephants, Akeley proposed his idea to the Museum. He wanted to preserve Africa in its unspoiled state in a great Hall of Africa at the American Museum of Natural History. The hall would include examples of African mammals in their original habitats, and no expense would be spared to make the exhibits achieve a realism that was beyond anything ever done before. Akeley told a friend of his, "Everything that has been done in the American Museum of Natural History in the way of African exhibits must be thrown out and completely discarded; we must start over again."

The idea of the habitat group—the showing of animals and plants in their native habitat against a realistically painted background—had originated at the Museum around ten years earlier. The concept was first tried out with the Museum's Hall of North American Birds, which drew tremendous popular acclaim. By 1909 the techniques of duplicating plants, flowers, rocks, trees, and backgrounds had been perfected. Akeley, however, wanted to take the habitat group a step further. Some habitat groups still appeared static and unreal, even though they were technically almost perfect. Akeley wanted to create habitat groups on a huge scale, and he wanted them to be bursting with vitality and spontaneity, to be esthetically beautiful as well as scientifically accurate. In short, he wanted his habitat groups to be works of art. For Akeley, this meant going back to Africa and starting from scratch—from collecting the animals and plants to photographing the landscapes and hiring and training new artists.

The Museum needed little persuasion. Akeley impressed the Museum with the need for the hall and the short time left to create it. The Museum began making plans to start work on the hall in 1914. All the collecting plans, however, were interrupted by World War I, and Akeley spent the war sketching plans and sculpting scale models.

Museum President Osborn put Akeley in charge of raising money for the African expeditions to collect for the new hall. Before raising money, Akeley felt he had first to return to Africa himself to crystallize many of the ideas he had been turning over in his head. So in 1921, Akeley went to Africa accompanied by a wealthy couple, the Bradleys, who wanted to hunt exotic animals. They hired Akeley as a "white hunter," with the understanding that the Museum got first choice of any animals they shot. On this trip, Akeley penetrated the high rain forest of the Belgian Congo for the first time and was captivated by its surreal beauty. In fact, he was so impressed by the area that he eventually persuaded King Albert of Belgium to declare a large section of the Kivu a national park and gorilla sanctuary—thereby helping to save the rare mountain gorilla from extinction.

This small area encompasses remarkable ecological extremes. The Kivu volcanoes rise from a sweltering lava plain where temperatures reach 120 degrees. At a higher altitude the flora becomes first a bushy scrub and then a thick bamboo forest. The higher slopes of the Kivu are covered with true jungle, although the weather resembles northern England more than equatorial Africa. Due to the high altitude, the volcanic slopes are soaked daily with cold rains and bone-chilling fog; hailstorms and nightly frosts are common. Higher up, the rain forest gives way to dwarf trees and subalpine conditions. Finally, at the summit, the volcanic craters themselves are barren and usually covered with snow.

Here, shy mountain gorillas live in a narrow band along the steep—almost vertical—mountain slopes, in the upper regions of the bamboo and the lower regions of the rain forest. On the 1921 safari, Akeley and Bradley shot several gorillas in this area—enough for Akeley's planned gorilla group in the hall. (On one hunt, Akeley had to lash himself and his dead gorilla to a tree in order to skin it on the steep slope.) During this trip, Akeley also took the first motion-picture footage of a gorilla in its native habitat.

It seems strange to us today that Akeley would find no contradiction in shooting rare animals for inclusion in a hall, whose purpose was to
preserve
African wildlife for future generations. In truth, Akeley saw hundreds of rare animals being slaughtered by professional hunters and their wealthy clients. In addition, thousands of square miles of wilderness were being cleared and fenced for farmland and grazing. What could be wrong, he reasoned, with taking a few more for the noble purpose of the Museum's African Hall, which would preserve the Africa he loved for future generations? Akeley himself, however, took little joy in killing, and on several occasions was unable to bring himself to shoot an animal he needed for a habitat group.

After his return from the 1921 safari, Akeley realized he needed to raise large sums of money if his hall was to be done properly. A wealthy friend, Daniel Pomeroy, suggested that George Eastman (of the Eastman-Kodak Company) might be able to help. Akeley seized upon the suggestion with such enthusiasm that Pomeroy was taken aback. He asked Akeley—somewhat nervously—how much he was going to ask Eastman to contribute. Akeley replied, "I'd like to see Mr. Eastman give us a million dollars." Pomeroy was horrified and tried to "tone Carl down," but Akeley was too excited.

On the night train to Rochester, Akeley kept Pomeroy up all night talking about the hall. "African Hall," Pomeroy later wrote, "had grown as important to him as life itself." As Pomeroy tried to sleep, Akeley remained in his seat, puffing furiously on his old corncob pipe. Periodically he burst out, "By heaven, Dan! If Mr. Eastman only can see how important, how necessary this is—" And then he would break off, too excited to continue.

When they met Eastman the next day, Akeley launched into a heated description of the hall. He told Eastman that he had a chance to create the "greatest exhibit in the world." "Even though I warned him," Pomeroy wrote, "about killing the goose that laid the golden egg, he could not refrain from naming a high figure." Without letting Eastman catch his breath, Akeley asked him point-blank for a million dollars.

The rotund, genial Eastman nearly fell out of his chair. But Akeley's enthusiasm had done the job, and Eastman promised an initial gift of $100,000, which would cover the cost of three or four dioramas.
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Pomeroy himself chipped in $25,000, and others followed suit. Each contributor of a diorama got, in turn, the chance to hunt for that particular group in the upcoming expedition, under the guidance of Akeley and other Museum explorers, and to have their names engraved in the hall. It was an attractive deal for anyone with a loose $25,000, and it allowed the Museum to control exactly how many and what animals were shot. The expedition was named the Eastman-Pomeroy-Akeley African Expedition.
^†18

Akeley himself decided to collect several groups. Most importantly, he wanted to do all the work for the Gorilla Group, which he envisioned as the finest in the hall. (Indeed, he hoped to make it the greatest diorama ever created.) Although he had collected the gorillas themselves on the 1921 expedition, he needed to return to the Kivu Volcanoes to gather material and take photographs for the foreground and background.

The expedition arrived in Africa early in 1926, and divided into small parties collecting in various areas of Africa. Before embarking for the Belgian Congo, Akeley went south to Tanganyika (now Tanzania) to obtain several specimens for another group. While there, he became ill with a fever and had to return to Nairobi to recuperate. But what Akeley had seen in East Africa in 1926 shocked him deeply. The destruction of wildlife was occurring at a much more rapid pace than he had previously thought possible. "I have not appreciated," he wrote to the Museum's Director during his convalescence, "the absolute necessity of carrying on the African Hall, if it is ever to be done, as I do now after this painful revelation.
The old conditions, the story of which we want to tell, are now gone, and in another decade the men who knew them will all be gone."
(Akeley's emphasis.)

Shortly, Akeley declared himself fully recovered. His wife and the others tried to dissuade him from the planned Congo expedition, as they felt his health was still poor, but Akeley insisted on carrying out the remaining duties of collecting for his favorite habitat group. He selected William R. Leigh, a brilliant young landscape painter, to accompany him and make the background paintings and studies. He chose a Museum preparator and expert taxidermist, R. C. Raddatz, to collect and prepare all the necessary specimens and materials for the foreground. Finally, a Belgian conservationist and cartographer named J. M. Derscheid accompanied them to map the unexplored Kivu Volcanoes and make zoological studies. Their plan was to approach the Congo from the east, through Kenya and Uganda.

On October 14, 1926, they started out along Kenyan roads in three trucks and a car. As they traversed the great plains of the Rift Valley, Akeley pointed out fenced-in farm areas that had once been covered with game. The government had set a bounty on crop-destroying animals such as zebra, and a wholesale slaughter was going on. The group ran into one old Boer farmer who told them, while pounding violently on their tea table, "Deeze zebra only vermin. I made good kill of two hundred myself only.... All farmers glad when all zebra are shot. We must raise crops."

In Uganda they camped near the domain bf a Ugandan king, who welcomed them with lavish hospitality, presenting them with milk, chickens, eggs, dry wood for their fires, and bananas. The king promised that on their return he would call his 7,000 subjects from his 2,500 square miles of territory so that they could be photographed by Carl. They continued along an old caravan route from Mombasa to the Nile, where the elephant grass grew twenty feet high, punctuated every so often with papyrus swamps and groves of ancient rubber trees (standing untapped because the going wage of a laborer—four cents per day—was too expensive).

At Kabale, in the far western corner of Uganda, next to the Belgian Congo border, the motor road came to an end. From this point on, all transportation would be over jungle trails by porter. Akeley hired two hundred porters "of magnificent physique," at the standard rate of five cents per fifty pounds per seven miles. At Lake Bunyoni, the first round of porters loaded up a flotilla of dugout canoes with their bundles and returned to Kabale. On the far side of the lake, beating drums summoned a new group of two hundred porters to continue the expedition up into the foothills of southwestern Uganda.

At the border of the Congo, they rested on a high ridge and gazed west into the geographical heart of Africa. Spread out before them they could see the sweeping plains, winding rivers, and smoking volcanoes of the Kivu in the pale, hazy atmosphere. High up on the green, forested slopes of the volcanoes, Akeley knew he would find his gorillas.

Carl always outdistanced his wife on the trail, but shortly after passing the Congo border, Mary came across her husband resting in the shade. He told Raddatz that they had to stop because he felt very "strange and dizzy." But by the next morning, after a frightful thunderstorm, Carl felt better and they continued on to the town of Rutshuru, the government post for the Eastern Kivu. From Rutshuru, the expedition trekked southwest over the foothills of the Kivu Mountains. Along the way, Mary herself came down with a touch of fever and had to be dosed with quinine.

Soon, they attained the lower slopes of the volcanoes. As they gained altitude, the dry scrub and unbearable heat was overtaken by an eerie bamboo forest, so thick that the group was enveloped in a strange twilight even at midday. Heavy fog and rain had turned the trail into a morass of sticky mud, and the forest floor spouted a profusion of brilliant orchids and fuschias. As their porters sliced through the bamboo with machetes, they ascended the slope, finding abundant signs of elephant, buffalo, and other big game. Finally, at about 7,000 feet, they came across a patch of uprooted bamboos, where a band of gorillas had taken its morning meal of tender shoots.

They continued upward, climbing a steep ridge running up the flank of Mount Mikeno, bordered by two precipitous cliffs, toward the Rweru (sometimes spelled "Rueru") camp that Carl had established in 1921. The camp lay nearly two miles high, at the transition zone between the bamboo and the true rain forest. Upon arrival, they found it almost returned to wilderness in the five years since Akeley had left it. "A few sodden bamboo and grass huts stood about in straggling disorder," Mary later wrote in her book
Carl Akeley's Africa.
"Everywhere was a close tangle of vegetation."

Heavy clouds had moved in during the day, and that night the drenching fog became so thick that visibility dropped to a few feet. Mary wrote:

The voices of the naked porters echoed and reechoed as if amplified by the fog which enveloped us. Invisible jungle fowl, disturbed in their roosting places, squawked incessantly as darkness fell. . . . But the weirdest sounds of all were the cries of the tree hyrax, indescribable, like nothing else I have ever heard. At midnight someone went out of his tent with a lantern. It evidently startled the tree hyrax for they set up a most appalling racket in which frogs and crickets joined until the whole world seemed quavering with the noise.... It was all too strange for sleep.

In the morning, following a rain, the clouds broke through, revealing a glimpse of the snow-capped volcanic peaks of Mikeno and Karisimbi. Almost a mile below them lay the blue sheet of Lake Kivu, blending imperceptibly into the sky. During the few fleeting moments of sun, Carl had taken his cameras down to the rim of the canyon to get a photograph of Nyamlagira, but missed the shot as the fog had once again descended by the time he arrived. He sent back his assistant with a note to Mary, asking her to join him to see the spectacular view when next the clouds broke. Mary and Carl waited together for over two hours without success, while the fog condensed and dripped off the hanging vines. Finally Carl gave up and told Mary that they could return tomorrow. There would be plenty of time, he said, to enjoy the loveliest view on earth. But Mary would not see this vista while Carl was alive. This would be their last moment alone together; the next day at the Rweru camp, Carl became sick with the violent dysentery that would later kill him.