Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  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.

  Mary L. Jobe Akeley was a remarkable women, in some ways even more remarkable than her husband. To understand Mary's role during the rest of the expedition, let us step back in time a moment to look at her earlier life. In Mary Akeley's old house in Mystic, Connecticut, is a box of photographic portraits, taken of her before she married Carl Akeley. One photograph shows a tall, rather stout woman with a big hat, wearing an outfit of oversized bloomers, leading a group of girls in a vigorous round of calisthenics. Another depicts her in a similar pair of bloomers and high-button boots, walking stick in hand, ascending the slopes of a mountain in the Canadian Rockies. A third shows her on horseback, on a mountain trail, with the Selkirks of British Columbia in the background. There are photographs of her in blizzards, standing on mountain peaks, and struggling through roaring tor
rents. By the time she married Carl Akeley, she was already a famous explorer in her own right, and she never allowed her fame to be overshadowed by Akeley's. (Indeed, when she died in the early 1960s, many newspapers erroneously reported that the Museum's African Hall had been named after her, not her husband.)

  Mary Jobe came out of the Midwest and attended Bryn Mawr and Columbia. While there, she accompanied a botanical expedition to British Columbia, and shortly afterward Mary herself led an expedition to map the headwaters of the Fraser River. On this expedition she climbed a previously unexplored peak in the northernmost Canadian Rockies, later named Mount Sir Alexander. She attempted a first ascent, but was driven back by avalanches and a blizzard. During the next several years she led seven expeditions to Canada, and the Canadian government christened a high peak in the Rockies "Mount Jobe" in her honor.

  In 1916, believing that young girls needed strenuous physical exercise, she founded Camp Mystic for Girls, in Mystic, Connecticut. She ran the camp like a Marine drill sergeant, teaching her campers outdoor survival and the value of physical fitness, sports, and exercise.

  In 1920 she was introduced to Carl Akeley, who was then married to Delia, his wife of seventeen years. Carl and Delia underwent an acrimonious divorce in 1923, and Carl and Mary married in 1924. He was sixty years old and she was thirty-eight.

  After her husband's death in the Belgian Congo, Mary continued to explore and to write books about Carl and herself (one of which prompted Delia to threaten a libel suit). As she grew older she became a rather crabby and suspicious recluse, living on top of a hill in Mystic in a rambling house stuffed with elephant-foot wastebaskets, leopard skins, African carvings, stuffed animals, decorated gourds and pots, and other bric-a-brac. In 1966, at the age of eighty, she died in a convalescent home, with few close friends and no close family.

  In 1977 the executors of her estate sent the Museum a couple of bulging cardboard boxes filled with yellowing folders, crumbling newspaper clippings, hand-tinted glass lantern slides, books, and a half-dozen journals tied in a bundle with a red silk ribbon. These were her field journals, recording in a dense, almost illegible hand the progress of her various expeditions.

  The first of the journals date from about 1915. The last one of the batch contains a hasty scrawl on the inside cover: "Kivu High Camp on slopes of Mt. Mikeno—Nov. 14, 1926 et seq." This rare and extraordinary journal—whose existence was previously unsuspected—begins with their arrival at the R weru Camp on Mount Mikeno, where Carl tried to show Mary the view of Nyamlagira from the canyon rim. Entries continue through her husband's death and after. It is a remarkable narrative, a detailed account in which Mary recorded with dispassionate accuracy her husband's illness and death.

  The volcano, Mary wrote, "we could see plainly almost every night as its fiery furnace of boiling lava illuminated the clouds & sky or as flame occasionally shot into the heavens....

  "Often," Mary continued, "when looking out of my tent, it seemed as if I were standing on the brink of a gulf, the clouds were so dense—& as if the whole world were falling away from me. At such times I could hear the song of the thrush."

  On November 11, Mary tells us, Carl had his first serious attack of nausea, which prevented their going to the canyon rim to photograph Nyamlagira. On the twelfth he felt better, but they decided to postpone moving up to their next camp until the weather cleared. He had another attack on the thirteenth, but felt somewhat better the following day. Carl was terribly anxious to reach the next camp, which lay on the saddle between the Karisimbi and Mikeno volcanoes, and so, on November 14, he ordered the expedition to break camp. Mary wrote:

  He was only weak when he got dressed, but walked up the hill at a quick pace. There he got in the hammock. I walked first behind him & we often remarked about the beautiful forest. Once, he made the boys stop to show me a beautiful tiny nest of the sun-bird hung in a great banner of gray-beard moss. Again when we came to the big trees with the platforms of fern-hung green moss, he said, "Mary, do you see now where the fairies dance?"

  Finally, when we got into the deepest, most beautiful forest, he said, "Now I am on my old trail...."

  They continued up the trail—Carl carried in the hammock, Mary walking beside him—until they were about a quarter-mile from the Saddle Camp, when Carl said he was cold and would walk. The forest was dark and dismal, and the graybeard moss was dripping with water from the fog. At the camp, Carl sat down under the fly of the cook tent, ordered a charcoal brazier lit, and had a cup of tea. "He talked energetically to Derscheid about the gorillas there," Mary recorded.

  That night, Mary didn't undress and visited Carl often in the night "when he was quiet." The next morning Carl was still feeling sick and couldn't keep down any food or drink.

  I got Raddatz to sorting supplies & Leigh & Derscheid went up to look for the place where Bradley killed his gorilla. There was a heavy hailstorm. I kept Carl warm 8t gave him hot water which was all he could take. I said to him in the A.M., "Well, I have got them all at work, if that is any consolation." He said, "It doesn't seem to matter now. But it will in the long run, I know." I asked him when the hailstorm came down if he wanted me to stay with him, if "he was afraid." He laughed a little laugh and said "No, honey, I'm not afraid. You go keep warm in your tent." That night Bill and I staid up. He seemed to sleep considerably & was quiet.

  When Raddatz asked him how he felt the morning of the seventeenth he said, "Quite comfortable." But soon after he had three intestinal hemorrhages in quick succession. When I tried to give him nourishment he was unable to take it but suggested chlorodyne to stop the hemorrhage, which I gave him. He said, "I've never taken it myself but I have used it with good results." So I gave it to him according to directions & at 9 it apparently made him feel better. He said, "If I had some means for intestinal feeding it might do some good." Then after the last hemorrhage he said "I can stand about one more."

  But from 9 to 11:30 he seemed quite comfortable tho very weak. Derscheid who felt his pulse suggested caffeine hypodermic. I said to him, "Dear, can the doctor give you a little tonic hypodermically" and he said "Yes." We gave it to him & he seemed to rest afterwards. Finally at 12:30 his bowels began to move again. Bill heard him stir, trying to get up. He put him back in bed. "I fixed a cloth for him."

  After a little while another hemorrhage came. I took care of him, washing him & putting a pad of soft cotton & a soft [illegible] and said "If anymore comes you are all taken care of." He had looked to see what had passed from him & then he lay back on his pillows. "I can't lie on my left side or back anymore," he said. In a few minutes he turned on his back and began to breathe spasmodically. I propped him up on extra pillows & put pillows under each arm. His eyes seemed looking far up to Karasimbi [illegible]. In about half an hour his heavy breathing stopped & he seemed to breathe quietly and turned over on his right side. I could still feel his pulse, faintly in his wrist but more pronounced in his neck. Derscheid gave him some more caffeine believing he was only in a stupor. But as he never reacted to it, his soul must have passed in those moments of rest following his heavy breathing. It was not, however, until 2:30 that we could believe that he had gone.

  Carl Akeley was dead. They kept his body in the camp until November 21, while several dozen of the porters, working in twelve-hour shifts around the clock, excavated a tomb in the soft lava rock on a high point above their tents. Raddatz embalmed the body, and told Mary that there was scarcely any blood left in Akeley's veins. He also made a coffin of heavy native mahogany, which they lined with tin cut from galvanized containers. Mary quilted the inside with the soft gray blanket that Carl had bought her for their wedding trip. Inside the coffin she placed her wedding ring, engraved, "Mary and Carl, October 28, 1924," along with his glasses, his soft eiderdown pillows, "and the warm Jaeger blanket we had so often slept in."

  Surrounding the burial plot they built an eight-foot-high stockade topped with sharpened spikes to keep out scavengers. On the right-hand side of the pl
ot, Mary directed that a space be left for her ashes. "I want to be cremated," she wrote, "and have my ashes repose beside his loved body. There is a space left on his right side for me...." (Her wish, for some reason, was never fulfilled, and she is buried in Ohio.) Before the coffin was lowered, they gave a short reading and a simple service. "I staid with him," Mary wrote, "for a few moments after the others had gone." As they carried him to the tomb, the sun broke through the clouds, "revealing what he had always said was the 'most beautiful spot in the whole world.' He had often said 'I want to die in harness and I want to be buried in Africa.'"