Lost Worlds by David Yeadon

far.”
    “It’ll be dark in a few hours.”
    “So—you can stay with them tonight. Come back in morning.”
    “You’ll be here?”
    “Of course. Jan has go to Mambasa and then come all way back. He will be long time. I will be here all night.”
    “Are these good men? I don’t want any more of their bangi.”
    “They good men. They are Efe. Efe are good people. They are forest people.”

     

     
    I couldn’t think of any more questions to ask. I stood up, this time without falling down. The coffee had given me new energy—and sanity. I groped in my backpack for some chocolate I’d bought in Kisangani, offered it around, and gobbled the remnants myself.
    “Okay, Amit. I’ll go.”
    The pygmies seemed delighted and did a little bouncy jig by the side of the track, stirring up the red dust.
    “Ah,” said Amit, “if you can see them when they dance…”
    “Yes, Jan told me they love dancing.”
    “It very big thing for them. Very important. Most Zaire people, we have forgotten the dances. But Efe live in deep places. They remember.”
    I said good-bye to Amit and promised to be back early in the morning. I had no idea where I was, where I was going, or what would happen, but somehow I trusted the three little men who hopped around me and then led me off through the high grass and stands of whispering bamboo at the roadside and into the forest. Their forest.
     
     
    It is difficult to explain what happened during the next few hours. Maybe it was the aftereffects of the bangi, maybe I was confused by the zip-zap sequencing of events, or maybe there’s real magic in the forest that doesn’t take kindly to crude revelations in written words.
    There are stories that metaphorize the Ituri Forest as Eden, the first paradise on earth. Of course every nationality values, even reveres, its own country. The Balinese, the Nepalese, the Mongols, the Navajo, the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Sri Lankans—each believe their land to be the most beautiful of places, the place where the earth, as we know it, began. And—being of a flexible and a generous nature—I usually agree with all of them. Beauty understood through the eyes of its beholder, and shared with that beholder, is beauty indeed. I have seen many places where the earth began and fell in love with each one of them.
    But the Ituri Forest was something I’d never experienced before. There was something utterly overwhelming about its silence, its space, and its majesty. Enormous trees, with roots that eased out of the earth like the smooth backs of dolphins, rose scores of branchless feet into twilit canopies, where they exploded in soft profusions of sun-dappled leaves and vine flowers of purple, yellow, and scarlet. Hundreds of air plants (epiphytes) drooped over the topmost branches like shaggy-haired kittens. Vines hung down like hairy ropes, inviting me to climb into the uppermost reaches and explore the busy territories of the white-nose and blue monkeys, the hornbills, and dozens of other species who rarely if ever visit the open forest floor.
    I hadn’t expected such openness. In other rain forests I’d explored, particularly in South America, the layering of the plant species was far more intense and frenzied. Here I walked through the equivalent of an English beech forest, bouncing on the moist, mulchy earth, admiring its rich range of bronzes, ochers, and golds. There was no need for panga knives to cut through the brush. There was hardly any brush. No stinging plants, no vicious thorns, no sticky fly-catchers, no razor-edged leaves. Only a few smaller trees and occasional flurries of fat-leaved bushes, but mostly space and cool air that seemed to fill my body with sweetness and wonderful calming silences in the green half-light.
    How different this was from the tangle of Panama’s Darien jungle and the impenetrable tumult of Tasmania’s rain forests. I walked as if floating—effortlessly, easily through the quietude—following my three