WE were ready to go at 6:30 A.M., but as I was zipping up the duffelbag the slide caught on my pajamas and, trying to free it, I forced it off one of its tracks. "What are we going to do now?" I asked Gamaembi. He started to work-removing the staple at the base of the tracks, rethreading the slide, putting back the staple-and in five minutes it was fixed. I was impressed, having operated hundreds of zippers but never having come to terms with one. I tended to take the mechanisms in my life for grantedeven had a slight aversion to thembut Gamaembi approached them with deep respect and curiosity. If in the United States the zipper in my pants had broken, I reflected, I would probably have thrown them away and bought a new pair. But this was not a throw-it-away society. There were no spare parts, no convenient repair shops. If something broke, you had no choice but to try to fix it.

We crossed the Afande half a mile downstream, inching along a partly submerged log. Almost at the end, I lost my balance and fell into furious brown water; I expected to be swept away, but it was only knee-deep. The three of us laughed, realizing we could have just waded across. Soon afterward, we crossed another river-the Afalu-and then we reached the first village in the forest: Zalondi.

Gamaembi had been explaining as we walked that in 1942 the men of his tribe had been forced by the Belgians to come out of the forest and build the road that went past Opoku. The road was needed to bring up war materiel to the Sudan, and after it was built the men were sent out to collect wild rubber, which was also needed. It was a period of great hardship for the BaLese. The men were separated from their wives and their shambas. There was little to eat. If they did not bring in their quota of rubber, they were beaten. After the war, the BaLese men were forced to live near the roadwhere they could be kept track of-to keep the road in repair, and to grow cash crops like peanuts, rice, and cotton. Their women joined them, and the villages in the forest were abandoned. During the fifties, the road was so well maintained that it was possible to take it at fifty miles per hour. The road superintendent, a Belgian, drove along it with a glass of water on his dashboard, and if any spilled he would make the chief in whose localite the accident had occurred clean his car. Maintenance of the road stopped abruptly with independence. Some of the BaLese immediately went back to their matongo, their ancienne place in the forest, and started new villages, but most of them remained on the road. It was disappearing, becoming not much more than a path that vehicles with four-wheel drive could traverse at about five miles per hour, and there was little to keep the BaLese on it. Because gonorrhea, perhaps in conjunction with other diseases, was making the women infertile, and because an epidemic of bacillary dysentery was killing the old, the weak, and the newborn, the population along the road was in decline. With each new devaluation of the currency, more BaLese were giving up on the cash economyon the promises that life on the road had held out-were returning to the places where their people had lived before, and were reverting to subsistence. In the past few years, a dozen new villages had started in the forest. The collectivite, like much of the country, was in a state of active regression.

Zalondi was a recent recolonization of one of the ancestral village sites. It consisted of three huts in a clearing surrounded by immense banana trees. The capita, a young man who was a friend of Gamaembi's, welcomed us warmly. In broken French, he told me that he had come to Zalondi a year ago, "for a rest." He went on to say, "There is too much derangement, too many thieves. I was getting tired of the police taking my chickens, and officials of the collectivite dropping in and expecting to be fed." Thirty Efe had a camp nearby, and a group of women and children from it were sitting in a doorway of one of the huts, all heaped together, nursing babies, combing each other's hair, enjoying each other's warmth. A sweet lanolin smell emanated from them. The oldest woman, a withered grandmother, puffed marijuana in a wooden pipe whose stem was the hollowed threefoot midrib of a banana leaf. The Efe like to smoke a lot of bangi before they go hunting-especially when they are going for elephant-or before they climb a honey tree, but sometimes they smoke so much it leaves them dazed and their projects are abandoned.

We traded a bar of soap for a hand of pudgy bananas that were only a few inches long, and traded some of Baudouin's bangi for a comb of thick, dark honey. The bananas were wonderfully sweet, and the honey was so strong I felt a surge of energy from it almost immediately. Bob, who had accompanied the Efe on honey-gathering expeditions, had told me that during July and August, the wettest months, the Efe roam the forest and eat nothing else. The start of the honey season is signalled by a long, woeful, high-pitched cry that is heard in the distance. The Efe say the sound is made by a newt who is about to lay her eggs and die, and that that is why her cry is woeful; but it i actually made by a crake.

No later than five-thirty in the morning, before the bees have left their hives, the Efe men fan out in groups of five or six, approaching trees and tilting their heads. When one of them hears a tree humming with the promise of honey, he blows a flute made from a sapling, as a joyous announcement to the others, and breaks branches around the bee tree to mark the site. After a man has found three or four such trees, he goes back with his companions (not necessarily right away but within several weeks) to get the honey, a procedure that may require daring feats of engineering, since the hive is often a hundred feet up and a bridge from a smaller tree-sometimes several bridges-must be built. On the spot, the men weave from mangungu two baskets-one for the honey, the other to fill with burning wet leaves-and the man who found the bees' hole climbs to it, and smokes the hive; after waiting for the bees to go into a torpor, he widens the hole with an axe and chops out the honey. When he returns to the ground, more often than not he will eat several pounds of honey and get on a sugar high-becoming excited to the point of screaming about the next tree he is going to raid. (The Efe seem immune to the nausea and chills of hyperglycemia.) A good hive can yield from twenty to twenty-five pounds of honey, and what the finder does not eat he brings to his wife and relatives. At the start of the honey season, the BaLese villagers give the Efe big chungus-aluminum pots capable of holding forty pounds of honey -which the Efe bring back full and trade for colorful wax-print cloth. The women of Zaire make saronglike pagnes from this cloth to wrap around their bodies. One year, there may be a bumper crop of honey, the next almost none, whereupon the Efe become uncharacteristically sad for that season.

The village clearing was swarming with bees (one stung me on the neck when I brushed it accidentally with my hands) and with skippers that had dull brown wings and stout green bodies-a species known as the striped policeman. Several chickens and emaciated dogs were snapping up the butterflies. The dogs were small, with curly tails, and were mostly hound. The breed is called the African barkless dog, because they don't vocalize as much as other dogs; they are thought to be like the first dogs that lived with man. Dogs are very important for driving game. Before a drive starts, the Efe tie wooden clappers around the necks of the dogs, about half of which belong to the BaLese villagers. One man, the beater, sings and shouts continually to keep the dogs moving. Four hundred yards from where the drive begins, the other men wait in a semicircle, very still, for panicky duikers to streak within bowshot. The hunters do not shoot at anything over thirty feet away; it is too chancy through the trees. Once an animal is hit, the dogs keep it on the move until it drops or passes by another hunter, who is waiting motionless to finish it off with another arrow.

I took out my camera and aimed it at three teen-age Efe girls, and they ran in mock terror behind a hut, where I could hear them giggling. I tried to photograph another Efe woman and her children, but she shooed them from the man-eating muzungu, so I gave up on taking pictures and turned on my Sony. When the girls behind the hut heard the three women I had recorded the day before, they returned and, not to be outdone, launched into a three-part yodel, breaking their voices on throaty aOO's that came with the haphazard timing of frogs in chorus or katydids in late August. The girls were as shy as birds, and their music was cosmic; their yodels seemed to resonate indefinitely. The way each took a different note is called hocket singing, but their collective sound, unlike contemporary Western music, came out in a pentatonic scale; it was based almost entirely on the dominant, with the occasional addition of sevenths, and was nearly always in a descending pattern. Every few seconds, another rhythm, another melody blended in. The Belgian ethnomusicologist Benoit Quersin has described the pygmies' music as "polyphonic en cascade." There is nothing quite like it elsewhere in Africa or in any other place.

The capita of Zalondi told Gamaembi of a village that had been started since his last visit. It was up the Mubilinga River, and we could go to it instead of to three villages that Gamaembi was already familiar with. I said it sounded like a good idea. When we were back in the forest, I asked to go first, so I could learn to find the way. The path was well worn and about a foot wide-twice as wide as an Amazonian footpath, because the Indians put one foot directly in front of the other as they lope along. Sometimes it had lots of little offshoots. It wasn't easy to tell the ones that were shortcuts from the animal trails that petered into nothing. The elephant trails, which crossed the path from time to time and sometimes followed it for a stretch, were deep and especially confusing. Sometimes the path would split in two, which meant that up ahead a tree had fallen across the original route. You took the newer-looking detour. Snapped saplings always meant something-usually that someone had rights to a nearby honey tree. Once, we came across a message carved on a tree in Swahili. It said, . according to Gamaembi:

                I came by here in December, when you had gone in search of honey. Bring me some quickly.
                               Sekuri

In time, I learned to let my feet make the decisions, and they were usually right.

The forest was quite hilly, and its physiognomy varied with the elevation. In some high places, it was as open as the woods in my native Westchester. In seasonally flooded places, we had to fight through vines and mangungu; it was like mata de cipo, a dense vine thicket in the Amazon. But it was never evil or teeming with danger, as writers brought up on Stanley and Conrad feel they should i make "the jungle" out to be. It was just intense. Maybe for me it was an adventure, but for Gamaembi and Baudouin it was home. There were few mosquitoes, and in eleven days we didn't see one snake, although the Gabon viper is said to be fairly common.  Knowing how slim the odds were of 1 running into a snake, let alone being' bitten by one, I had not brought any antivenin.  We passed through a stand of shrubs with glossy leaves and small, fragrant, starlike white flowersrobusta coffee, either a natural stand or escapees from an abandoned village. Gamaembi did not know. Coffea robusta used to be considered native to the Zaire Valley, but now there is some question about its origin. It is grown widely here and exported, mainly for instant coffee. Moments later, we stampeded a sounder-as a herd is called-of ten or so bright-red bush pigs with long white dorsal crests. Gamaembi and Baudouin dropped their baggage and took off after them. "Restez donc que nous partons," Baudouin told me, in solemn, antiquated French. In a little while, they came back, empty-handed. When we reached the turnoff to Mubilinga, the new village, Baudouin dropped three mangungu leaves in the path as a courtesy to other BaLese and pygmies in the forest who might be interested in our movements. Minutes later, we surprised an okapi, an aberrant forest giraffe so secretive and sharp of hearing that it was one of the last large mammals to become known to science; a complete skin was not obtained until 1901. Though its habits are still largely unknown, it has become the unofficial faunal symbol of Zaire, lending its name to a hotel, a filter cigarette, and the folding knife that is carried by policemen. An adult male okapi stands eight feet tall and elk proud, with a coat of mauve velvet a~ shiny as a curried horse's and with white slashes across the rump and forelegs-disruptive coloration, such as zebras have, perhaps to confuse leopards. It has large, nervous ears; short, furry horns pointing backward; a long tongue, for licking its eyes clean and for pulling down foliage (it is the only deep-forest terrestrial leaf-eater in the Ituri); and an elongated head and neck, which also relate to its eating habits but which are not nearly as long as those of its gregarious cousin of the savanna. The female has no horns and is larger than the maleone of the few such cases among large mammals. The okapi inhabits only the Ituri Forest and is thus a rare animal, though in the forest it is common. It tames readily. This okapi bolted before I could even determine its sex. A bit later, Gamaembi flushed a family of blue duikers by hissing into a thicket, but they, too, to my secret delight, ran off, as silently as fleeting shadows, before Gamaembi could even feather his bow. They wait for the cover of night to appear in the open. "You can't see them at all when they're still," Gamaembi told me.

We had better luck with mushrooms. The forest gave us seven more imamburama that morning, and Baudouin spotted a colony of edible white ikiangi fastened to a mossy fallen tree. Their stalks were shaggy, their caps depressed at the center and spattered with little gray squamules. I had never seen such woods for mushrooms. Racks of yellow-gilled shelf fungi hung twenty feet up. Tiny, purple-striped parasols stood on mildewed green slivers of wood, and there was a violently poisonous off-white member of the genus Phallus whose cap was surrounded by a mantle of delicately reticulated deliquescent tissue. I asked Gamaembi how many kinds of mushrooms were good to eat. He started to tick them off on his fingers, then gave up and said, "More than I can count." Bob Bailey knew at least sixteen.

After about half an hour on the new path, Gamaembi and Baudouin heard voices in a gully and went off to see whose they were. "There are men talking and women singing down there," Gamaembi said as he left. I couldn't hear a thing-only birds. One had a descending whistle that sounded like a bomb dropping. Others pulsed in audibility. A robin chat sang a quotable theme, which I whistled back. It answered with the theme again, then mocked it in half a dozen brilliant variations. After a while, I heard dogs howling in the gully, then Gamaembi and Baudouin shouting to identify themselves, then a great shout from the people they had startled, then silence. Soon Gamaembi and Baudouin returned with two Efe men and their wives, who had been looking for honey.

Half an hour later, we met on the path two BaLese men and two women who looked to be pygmoids-BaLeseEfe mixes. The pygmoids are raised by the villagers. A BaLese man will not permit an Efe woman to go back to the forest with their child, and the BaLese fight over the right to bring up even children who are not their own. In a society without writing, children are perhaps the most precious commodities, because the only way to achieve immortality, to have your name continue for several generations, is through them. If the child is a girl, his bow. They wait for the cover of night to appear in the open. "You can't see them at all when they're still," Gamaembi told me. 

We had better luck with mushrooms. The forest gave us seven more imamburama that morning, and Baudouin spotted a colony of edible white ikiangi fastened to a mossy fallen tree. Their stalks were shaggy, their caps depressed at the center and spattered with little gray squamules. I had never seen such woods for mushrooms. Racks of yellow-gilled shelf fungi hung twenty feet up. Tiny, purple-striped parasols stood on mildewed green slivers of wood, and there was a violently poisonous off-white member of the genus Phallus whose cap was surrounded by a mantle of delicately reticulated deliquescent tissue. I asked Gamaembi how many kinds of mushrooms were good to eat. He started to tick them off on his fingers, then gave up and said, "More than I can count." Bob Bailey knew at least sixteen.

After about half an hour on the new path, Gamaembi and Baudouin heard voices in a gully and went off to see whose they were. "There are men talking and women singing down there," Gamaembi said as he left. I couldn't hear a thing-only birds. One had a descending whistle that sounded like a bomb dropping. Others pulsed in audibility. A robin chat sang a quotable theme, which I whistled back. It answered with the them again, then mocked it in half a dozen brilliant variations. After a while, I heard dogs howling in the gully, then Gamaembi and Baudouin shouting to identify themselves, then a great shout from the people they had startled, then silence. Soon Gamaembi and Baudouin returned with two Efe men and their wives, who had been looking for honey.

Half an hour later, we met on the path two BaLese men and two women who looked to be pygmoids-BaLeseEfe mixes. The pygmoids are raised by the villagers. A BaLese man will not permit an Efe woman to go back to the forest with their child, and the BaLese fight over the right to bring up even children who are not their own. In a society without writing, children are perhaps the most precious commodities, because the only way to achieve immortality, to have your name continue for several generations, is through them. If the child is a girl, penetrated the canopy. "We already have umbrellas," J oa~im joked. We exchanged addresses and promised to correspond, then went opposite ways. When he had gone, Gamaembi said, "Joacim's father is getting old, and he will be the next chief, because no one else in the collectivite is as intelligent or as educated. Only he and his brother can afford shotguns. He hunts on this side of the road, his brother on the other. When he kills an elephant, he takes the ivory and leaves the meat for his people. He brings news and tetracycline. Some of his friends are soldiers."

I asked if it had been hard for his sister when J oacim took other wives, and Gamaembi said, "The first wife always complains." 

A little later, Joacim came running up behind us. "My friends are probably wondering where I am," he said, with a grin. "I left without telling them. I will go to Mubilinga with you." Gamaembi told me later that it was a great honor for Joacim to have returned. On the way, Joacim showed me a golden vine with asperous bark, rough to the touch, like sandpaper, that would give you a nasty scrape and was to be avoided. He had the coat liner on inside out, and I could see a label at the nape; it said "WinHite." I asked where he had got the garment. From a trader, he said. Big bundles of clothing donated by American church organizations arrive in Kinshasa, and by the time they reach the Ituri Forest-having ascended the Zaire by riverboat, been transferred to trucks, and finally to green wooden chests strapped over the back wheels of bicycles, which BaBudu traders walk from village to village-they have to be paid for. In the middle of nowhere, you ran into T-shirts that read "RICH'S EAST STATE SUNOCO" or  "LABORATORY OF NEURO-PHYSIOLOGY DOWNSTATE MEDICAL CENTER CREW TEAM."

After half an hour, we came to a pygmy camp, but its eight huts were empty. In the middle of the clearing was a large stone for whetting arrows and a small stool made of four crossed sticks lashed together with vines. I could find no water in the vicinity. The Efe do not camp along rivers, because malaria- and filaria-bearing insects breed there. The women have to bring the water in pots to camp. They do not bathe every day and can do with a very small trickle. I asked Joacim why the Efe didn't grow things. He said that it was because they didn't like to sit in one place for the whole year, and because they didn't like sunlight. "The Efe come to you with meat and say they have a friend who wants bananas, when it is really they themselves," he said, with a laugh. "They say they will come early and work in your shamba, and it is afternoon and they haven't come yet."

After another hour, we reached Mubilinga. As soon as they saw us, a man of about forty and two women quickly gathered some things and left. An old man standing before one of the huts with his knees shaking and his eyes on the treetops said that they had gone fishing. Gamaembi said the old man was cold, so I gave him some aspirin. He told us that the village had been started two years earlier, and that there were three men and two women in it, and twelve Efe who came and went. Richard W rangham had asked me to make a census of each new village, so I took down the name, age, and clan of each resident. The ages that the old man gave me were very approximate. Few BaLese born before 1960 know how many years they have been alive. They speak of being born before the road was built or before a certain man became chief or after the Belgians went away or during the Rebellion (the Simba Rebellion of 1964, during which tens of thousands were killed and much of Haut-Zaire was devastated ).

Joacim stayed for a while and talked with me in the baraza. The baraza is like the men's hut in the Amazon. It is where the men sit and make things and discuss what is happening in the village. Usually, it is nothing more than a thatched roof on upright poles. It starts to fill up at noon. Joa<;im followed world developments on a short-wave radio and had a theory about why Israel always beat Egypt. Maybe an Egyptian woman got pregnant in Israel, went back to Egypt to have the baby, sent him to the best schools, and he grew up to be a general. Then she told him that his father was an Israeli, and he became a mole.

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