Gorillas in the Mist by Farley Mowat Page A

people Dian met in Rwanda.
    Rosamond Carr was a petite fifty-three-year-old American expatriate who had been living in the shadow of the Virungas for thirty years. She made her living growing flowers on her small plantation and selling them to hotels and resorts around nearby Lake Kivu and in the capital, Kigali. One day near the end of July 1967, Mrs. Carr was invited to lunch at the home of the American military attaché in Kigali.
    “I dropped in on the ambassador’s wife on my way, and she said to me, ‘Rosamond, you are going to meet a really very strange girl at lunch today. She is Dian Fossey, who has been studying gorillas in the Congo and has only just escaped from there. She’s looking for a place to camp, but be careful. She is really
very
odd.’
    “Odd? Well, I suppose she had a reason to be so considering the absolutely desperate experience she’d just been through. Anyway, I went on to lunch at the Frayzes’, and that first meeting with her was something I could never forget. She was so attractive—so
vital
. I mean, she was absolutely stunning with her hair in this long black braid flung carelessly over one shoulder and a glowing look in her face. She had on the most beautiful dress you could imagine. A pale lilac color—I mean, absolutely from a tip-top shop. And then, the poor little thing—the poor
tall
thing—she had very large feet and the only shoes she’d managed to keep were tennis shoes that were filthy and
enormous
. And so here she was with this beautiful dress, her lovely hair, and those awful shoes!
    “I immediately saw what the ambassador’s wife had meant, because she had this absolutely wild look in her eye.
    “We went in to a beautiful lunch with crystal and silver. We all sat down and Dian immediately pulled out a notebook—the cheap kind you can pick up for ten francs here. She just ignored her hosts, the Frayzes, stared straight at me, and demanded, ‘Mrs. Carr, I have some questions for you.’ The questions were numbered, one to about twenty. She’d ask one, check it off, and move right on to the next. The first was; ‘May I use your plantation as a base camp to start my studies of gorillas again?’
    “‘Well,’ I said, ‘you can, but you won’t find gorillas on the Rwandan side of Mt. Karisimbi.’ She said, ‘Oh, no, you’re absolutely wrong about that. The gorillas are there.’ And I replied rather definitely, ‘I’m sorry, they’re
not
on this side of Karisimbi.’
    “She’d never been on this side of Karisimbi, but she was so certain she was right, and she just went on firing these questions at me. The poor Frayzes—their luncheon was anything but a social occasion, I’m afraid.”
    During those first few days in Kigali, Dian had no more time to waste on social amenities than on the scenery. Apprehensive as to how Leakey would react to her “failure” in the Congo, she was determined to establish a foothold for a research station on the Rwandan side of the Virunga chain before having to face him in Nairobi. She had already sought permission from the Rwandan authorities to set up camp in the Parc des Volcans, adjacent to the Congolese Parc des Virungas and Kabara. Unfortunately, she had not been able to find anybody who knew where the gorillas were. Because Rosamond Carr lived close to the forested lower slopes of the volcanoes, she had hoped for help from her. Mrs. Carr did not disappoint her.
    “The one person who has the answers you need,” she told Dian after the lunch was over, “will soon be flying into Nairobi from Paris. You’ll be in Nairobi and can see her there. Her name is Alyette de Munck, an utterly charming Belgian lady who has lived in Africa the best part of her life, mostly near the volcanoes that she knows like the palm of her hand because she loves them dearly and has climbed all over them.”
    Mrs. Carr went on to explain that Alyette de Munck and her husband, Adrian, had raised one son of their own, together with the three