The next morning, Gamaembi again demonstrated his handiness, melting one of my Ziploc bags with a match and sealing with the liquid plastic a crack that had developed in the mafuta bottle. Soon after leaving the village, we crossed a stream full of milky quartz pebbles that puzzled him. "This stream has too many stones,"he said. There was no obvious source for them nearby, and many were too large for such a small stream to have borne them any distance. He showed me some large, round depressions in the soft, miry leaves-elephant prints. We passed a place permeated with the smell of crested mangabeys, who had slept there. We picked some edible yellow gilled mushrooms called lobolobo. I photographed a lily with a clustered inflorescence of pale-orange flowers, each with six petals and six exserted stamens. I also photographed white, trumpet-shaped blossoms that dripped from a twining liana in the birth wort family. Flies were induced to enter the trumpets by a carrion smell; were trapped inside, by retrorse hairs; and were released within twenty-four hours, smothered with pollen, when the hairs wilted. But these were rare splashes of color in an otherwise drab green understory. It was the wrong time of year for flowers, and even at the right time the lower strata of the Ituri Forest are relatively poor in showy flowers; nor are the sunbirds, which drink their nectar, as numerous as hummingbirds are in the Amazon. Heavy taboos protect such blooms as there are from would-be pickers. There is an orchid, for instance, that the pygmies believe must never be touched, or a heavy rain will come and make branches fall on them-perhaps the greatest danger to someone walking in the forest. Conservation may have had nothing to do with the belief; there is often no functional explanation for what the Efe think and do.

We found a lime tree-all that was left of a BaBudu village-and helped ourselves to half a dozen limes. We were on the edge of BaBudu country. Gamaembi said we would visit three villages that day-Matiasi, Selemani, and Azangu. Men named Matiasi, Selemani, and Azangu were the capitas. As often as not, a BaLese village is known by the name of its capita. Opoku, for example, is also known as Abdullah; Opoku is the stream that runs by. The BaLese generally name their villages after the water they drink. But the other name of the village of Matiasi was Pumzika Un, which meant Resting Place One, and Selemani was Pumzika Deux. I was reminded of a hamlet called Rest-andBe-Thankful, in the mountainous interior of Jamaica, which I once passed through. The village whose capita was Azangu was also named for a certain kind of fly.

WHEN we reached Matiasi, Gamaembi guessed it was nine thirty-five, and it was. He had once had the use of a wristwatch, and his sense of clock time was uncanny. The capita Matiasi was Gamaembi's maternal uncle. Two of his little cousins ran up and hugged him. Several hundred large pierid, or White, butterflies had congregated in the middle of the village. Through their shimmering wings, I could see a young BaLese mother in a doorway looking deep into her baby's eyes and stroking its forehead as it fed at her breast. A constant humming of voices, most of them pygmy women's, filled the clearing and occasionally broke into song. "They are singing, 'Why do you come each time with a muzungu?' " Gamaembi told me. Two Efe boys came up and asked for a cigarette. A while later, they returned with six small fish. "The Efe are like that," Gamaembi explained. "You give them something and they give you something back." Baudouin beheaded and plucked and cut up a chicken we had bought for ten zaires, holding my pot between his feet as he threw in the pieces and added manioc greens and mafuta to fry them in. The boiled greens are called sombe, and are a Zairian staple. Fish or the meat of antelope or elephant can also be added. The spinachlike greens are very nutritious, being rich in Vitamins A and C and containing adequate quantities of seven of the eight essential amino acids. Manioc is native to Brazil and was brought to Africa by the Portuguese. It is puzzling that the Amazonians eat the starchy roots but do not eat the leaves as often.

In Selemani, an hour farther on, we met a family of BaBudu who had come from Wamba, a populous town two days to the west, to trade clothes and mafuta for meat. The proximity of Wamba was another good reason for the BaLese to move into the forest. I noticed a net stuffed in the rafters of the baraza. Hunting nets, which are made from a vine in the spurge family called kusa, are used by the pygmies of the BaBudu and the BaBira but rarely by the Efe, to whom this one was probably on loan. It is much more efficient to drive game into a net than to hunt it with a bow, but the Efe have not adopted the method; perhaps from pride or perhaps because it would force them to live in larger groups. Three or four families are not enough people for an effective drive.

At two o'clock, we reached Azangu. The capita was Gamaembi's father's "brother ," or ndugu; he was from the localite, though not from the same clan. An old man with a sly, humorous face, he was wearing a purple shirt and sitting in a wicker deck chair weaving a shallow basket for winnowing rice. The chair, a far more finished piece of furniture than the BaLese produce, was made by the Mangbetu, a tribe to the north; such chairs are a popular trade item. After studying me for some time, Azangu thanked me for coming and said, "You are big, as our people used to be." (I am six feet tall and was about twenty pounds overweight.) Excess body fat, implying that you have plenty of food and have other people to do your work for you, is a status symbol in black Africa. The only men in the collectivite who were in my league were Joac;im's father and the judge. Azangu must have thought I was an important person. I spent the afternoon conversing with him through Gamaembi, after bathing in the river and painting with Merthiolate the cuts and open sores of several Efe, whose camp was below the village. I told my patients it would sting for a moment, and afterward they would feel better. They sucked in their breath, as if in pain, even before the applicator touched them.

I dropped a tablet of effervescent Vitamin C into a cup of water and passed it to Azangu; who screamed "Ow!" with delight before he drank.. Later, when I played the guitar, he stood up and did a .little shuffle, which everybody had to come and ,watch. When he had sat down again, he tapped some snuff from a Coca-Cola bottle, inhaled it, and dictated into my Sonya letter of introduction to Moto Moto, the most important chief in the southern part of the forest: "This is Alex. He spent the night here. I need a shirt and some pants."

"Azangu is the biggest village around here," Gamaembi explained. "Moto Moto is the capital of all the little villages de ce cote Iii."

We stayed that night in a small hut without windows. Gamaembi barred the door on the inside, and I asked why we needed so much security. He said, "It is our custom." It was not attack from another village he was worried about. Fifty years ago, the BaLese had raided each other's villages for women, as the Yanomamo of northern Amazonia still do today, but the Belgians had put a stop to the practice. Nor was it spirits, who could walk through walls, that concerned him. It was enemies, who could change into leopards through sorcery and kill you as you slept. Metamor phosed enemies were not afraid of fire, as real leopards are.

The BaLese and the Efe believe that mbolozi, or witches, are at the bottom of all sickness and death, even when there is a clear natural cause. There had been a case of witchcraft in Opoku not long before I arrived. A woman had slept with her husband's brother. The man had fallen in love with her and then had died, and his jealous widow had accused the woman of killing him with dawa, or "medicine," which can be either sorcery or actual potions, such as water that has been used to wash a cadaver (which might be put in food). It is a crime against the state to be a witch, and the police had come from Bangupanda, a day's walk. As they were dragging the I woman away to prison she was beaten I by all the women of the village, for-I merlv her friends. One of the police men "ate" her-bit her arm, making it septic-and she almost died. But the woman had recovered, and she now lived in a separate community of outcasts near Opoku, with her mother and four men who had also been categorized as mbolozi. The BaLese and the Efe live in constant fear both of being harmed by mbolozi and of being accused of witchcraft themselves. The local mbolozi tend to be old, unproductive members of the community. "They have nothing to think about except how their friends and relatives did them wrong," Gamaembi explained. But most mbolozi are not in one's own clan or village, or even in one's own tribe. Gamaembi told me about how his wife, Anna, had got sick, and he had had to walk for a day to the Mamvu, a tribe to the north, to get special dawa from their sorcerer, because the mbolozi was thought to be from that tribe. The dawa was some leaves that, after they had been ground up and brewed to make a tea, compelled Anna to name her mbolozi, who I was, indeed, a Mamvu nobody new.' Only then could her witch doctor prescribe counteractive dawa-some different leaves-and she got well. The effect of the leaves was presumably purely psychological.

Outside, still sitting in the baraza, Azangu told stories about mean Belgians in a voice the whole village could hear. I slept deeply in the pitch darkness. In the morning, Azangu asked to see another Vitamin C tablet dissolve in water.  Soon after crossing the Angu River, we met an Efe man and his wife. Using an iron arrowhead, he was whittling the shaft of another arrow to a point, for hunting monkeys, and he had a round wooden plug in the pierced philtrum of his upper lip. The labret may have been a vestige of the large lip disc that used to be in vogue, which may have served to emphasize the sexual function of the mouth. This I was a rare sighting, as Efe men carve lip plugs for their wives but seldom wear them themselves. This man's wife was carrying a smoldering faggot to start their next fire with and an empty bottle of Primus, the most popular beer, to put honey in. 

We reached the village of Adremani by midmorning. The capita, Bernard, bore an amazing resemblance to the, young Harry Belafonte. He was sitting in the baraza with a policeman in ragged, epauletted green fatigues and worn-out sneakers who had come to collect the annual head tax from the people in the forest. The policeman, who had an Okapi-brand folding knife for a weapon, had brought a prisoner as his porter. The man, whose hands were tied, had been arrested in Digbo for making alcohol from manioc, which is illegal-although all the Zairois, and especially policemen, drink it. Somebody must have wanted the man arrested; perhaps it was the policeman himself, knowing that he was going into the forest for several months and could use a porter, and that the man would never be able to come up with the three-hundred-zaire fine for making home brew.

In the afternoon, farther up the Angu River, we came to a village of four huts, named Angu-Kinshasa, after the capital of Zaire. The capita, Sadiki, was forging a curved brush hook, pumping with his foot a bellows made of the endlessly useful mangungu. As I was going through my duffelbag, his eyes fell on my blue cap, and he asked me for it. I asked what he would give me in return. He went into his hut and brought out a cup carved of very hard gray wood, and we made the trade-both of us thinking we had got the better of the deal.

In the clearing, his fifteen-year-old daughter, already a sultry young woman and pregnant by a BaBudu trader, was pounding the hulls off some rice in a mortar. A boy led me to a stream. As I washed in a pool, a huge velvet-brown swallowtail butterfly with luminous lemon-green wing bands-it flew so strongly I thought at first it was a bird-patrolled the streambed possessively, disappearing upstream and returning every few minutes. It was the largest of several brown-and-yellow species in the genus Graphium. Downstream, the boy was checking traps for catfish. He came back with two freshwater crabs that had walked into them. Suddenly, I was in a whirl of smaller butterflieshairstreaks-which changed from dull purple to brilliant blowtorch blue whenever sunlight hit their wings. I watched one land on a leaf and rub its long, slender tails together, perhaps to make them seem even more like its antennae. On its folded hind wings, black spots, ringed with orange and shot with a zigzag of opalescent green, furthered the illusion that the insect was resting face down. The purpose of the illusion was probably to fool predators into striking at a part of its body which it could better afford to lose than its head.

When I returned to the village, Sadiki was drunk on banana wine -le whisky zairois, Gamaembi called it. After dark, the whole village, roused by Sadiki, had a dance in our honor. An Efe man tapped a brisk, contagious rhythm on a drum, three Efe women yodelled, and all the others joined in a BaBudu chant they knew. Tramping in a circle with our hands on the next person's shoulders, we hopped to either side with both feet together, like downhill skiers, or stood and watched as two people on opposite edges of the circle jumped in, acted spooky for a few seconds, then dropped back to their places. I spotted two new uses of mangungu, of which I had begun a list: one of the Efe women wore an upright leaf, like a feather, on a head band; another had a bracelet pouch, rather like a disco bag, on her wrist.  In the morning, all the villagers put on their best clothes for an official photograph. Some of them went with us for a little way into the forest.

Soon after they had turned back, we could hear the Mambo River rushing through a gorge to our right. After following it for four and a half hours, we reached Salumu, the last village that any muzungu had ever been to. Sadiki had told me that he talked regularly to Salumu with drums, although all he could say was "Corne here." In other parts of Africa, drummers can communicate full paragraphs.

In Salumu, several magnificent roosters paced the clearing, and a young man with aT-shirt that said "Houston 38" was strumming a homemade stringed instrument carved in the shape of an electric guitar. We were offered, as a special treat, some smoked elephant meat. I put a chunk in my mouth but could not bring myself to swallow it. It was as tough as rubber and it smelled and tasted weeks old. Gamaembi, talking with the villagers about where to go from here, learned of a new village called Pereni, which some of their people had started. A pygmy named Sabani offered to take us there, but his wife wouldn't let him go, so we went on by ourselves.

We crossed the Ngawe River almost immediately. It flowed south; the other rivers we had crossed flowed north.  After three and a half hours, we carne to Pereni, which was not really a village but a still. It owed its existence to a grove of raffia palm trees, whose juice becomes alcoholic within a few hours of being tapped. Two young men named Mosalia and Shafiku and their women ran the still, which was not legal. Mosalia was wearing a Wonder knit shirt with a label that said, "Washing instructions: only machine wash-warm tumble dry-no bleach." Shafiku was an Efe-BaLese mestizo. That night, passing around halved calabashes full of palm wine, we made up a song that consisted of one line in Swahili, "It is just us here," and shouted it again and again in the darkness, like dogs howling at the moon.

In the morning, we were given a tour of the works. Since their arrival, Mosalia and Shafiku had cut down seven trees, and they were all still exuding juice, or wine, which the two men collected every twenty-four hours from homemade clay pots they had left beneath the dripping ends of the fallen trunks. "It flows day and night," Mosalia told me. The wine was slightly hard, like cider or birch beer, and very drinkable. It is a beverage of great antiquity, mentioned by Herodotus. We tasted wine from a tree that had been cut down a month earlier and was still dripping, and wine from one felled only the day before. The fresher stuff was more acid and carbonated, the other calmer and smoother, rather like Beaujolais. As we drank, we sat and watched two white lines way above the clouds trace themselves across the sky. Gamaembi, who had never been near an airplane, said, "That one holds four hundred and fifty people."

from the trees, Mosalia and Shafiku poured it into an oil drum, heated it while it evaporated up a length of hollowed bamboo, and bottled the distillate as it condensed and ran down another bamboo tube. The final product, known as kaikbo (it is also distilled from corn, bananas, or manioc), was as strong as gasoline, Mosalia claimed, and exploded when you threw it on a fire. They were making thirty bottles a day and selling them to BaBudu traders. He offered to sell us some, but Gamaembi, looking anxiously at Baudouin, shook his head. Baudouin was already drunk, and it was only eight o'clock. With great difficulty, we got him to his feet and on the path. He didn't want to leave at all. "Pereni c' est matata," he said. Matata means "trouble," in a positive sense. He managed to stagger along for about half a mile; then, overcome by a mixture of wine and pot, he vomited and passed out. As he slept, half a dozen huge cicadas, each blending with the mossy bark of a different tree, droned around us.

We waited for Baudouin to come to, and Gamaembi talked about the store he was going to start with his half brother Kuri. He would bring the goods by bicycle from Digbo: simple things at first-cooking pots, flashlights, drinking glasses, soap, needles, cigarettes-slowly building up to more expensive items, like radios and waxprinted cloth. Then he would put a tin roof on the store. Then he would buy a truck. He already had a bicycle. Bicycles were not cheap in Haut-Zaire. Even a beaten-up wreck cost six hundred zaires. But he and Kuri owned a coffee shamba together. With three hundred zaires they had made from selling the beans, they had paid some Efe-in soap, shirts, and pants-to kill an elephant with spears. A local fraudeur, or smuggler, had bought the tusks and the teeth for two thousand zaires. He would sell them to the next level of fraudeur, and from then on they would be the focus of numerous illegal dealings. Perhaps the subregional administrator in Isiro, the nearest large city, would acquire them (a few weeks earlier in Isiro I had watched as dozens of tusks wrapped in burlap were hurriedly loaded onto the plane on which I had just arrived).  They would probably end up in Hong Kong, to be carved into coffee-table objects and jewelry for consumers in the West. Gamaembi figured he had enough to start with-nine hundred zaires for the merchandise, two hundred for incidental expenses like keeping the police off his back. I thought how unfortunate it was that the only way a young man in Gamaembi's position could get ahead was to kill an elephant.

By eleven, Baudouin was ready to continue. We crossed the N gawe again-on a fallen tree, with a vine railing along which a column of small red ants was moving. They jumped on my hand instantly and covered it with bites. We saw fireflies with dazzling blue wings, and an elongated b1ackand-white butterfly that was hardly distinguishable from the dappled shadows among which it was lazily flapping. We arrived at Dulungu by mid-afternoon, stayed long enough to take a census-Dulungu was seventeen years old, one of the oldest of the new villages in the forest, with a population of eight-and pushed on to make Sandiki by nightfall.

From Sandiki, it was eight hours to the next village, Mangiese, by a path that went along a shrubby ridge most of the way. Mangiese was on the Isolo River, and four families lived there. Eight prospectors from Mambasa, a relatively large town on the Kisangani road, which was the capital of the zone, were lodging there, too. Gold had been found in a stream near Moto Moto, about fifteen miles away, and the discovery had sparked a small gold rush in the southern Ituri Forest. I photographed the prospectors, with their picks and shovels. "They want to get rich without working in shambas," Gamaembi said, perhaps a little enviously. If gold was found near Mangiese, it would no longer be a quiet village in the forest. Already, the doors of its huts were padlocked.

Andalita, the capita of Mangiese, was the son of Gamaembi's aunt, and he received us as family. He mended Baudouin's torn pants on his sewing machine and fixed a broken buckle on my side bag. He was not one for lounging in the baraza. It had taken him only a week to clear a large shamba we had passed on the way to the village. As the bees died down and daylight faded and a flock of green forest ibises, hurrying to their roosts, flew over and filled the sky with trumpeting, he chipped weeds in the clearing with a hoe. "This has to be done every two weeks," he said. His two-year-old daughter, Molai, followed him with a little hoe, stabbing at weeds, and in a vinegrown shamba behind them his wife, Ubolubu, of a delicate and sensitive beauty, picked leaves for a flyswatter. They seemed a happy family.

After dark, Ubolubu came to the baraza with boiled bananas and chicken and sombe on a real silver platter. (Andalita must have been panning a little gold himself, I thought.) Molai, with coils of thread in her pierced ears, sat on my lap and looked up at me with wonder. She had never seen a mzungu. I couldn't get a smile out of her. I played a little to her on my guitar, but one of the strings broke. The villagers and the prospectors sang the Zairian national anthem, which was in French, for me; then they fell into their own language. On the edge of the sky, flickering flashes of lightning momentarily eclipsed the stars and the fire's glow, and illumined clouds, looming trees, tattered banana leaves, a battered pot in the middle of the gray clay clearing, and Molai, who had moved to a little chair against a post but was still staring at me with her mouth open. I thought of how Gamaembi had promised that afternoon to give me his bracelet, woven from the black hair of an elephant's tail, to commemorate our friendship. But he still did not quite believe that if a well-cooked plate of human flesh were put before me I would be able to pass it up. "A few years ago, my cousin bought what he thought was a can of sardines at a store in Kisangani," he had told me. "He opened it, and there was a hand inside. The owner of the store, a mzungu, begged him to keep it a secret." The basis of this story probably went back to the First World War, when the natives of the Congo were first forced to collect rubber, and the Belgians sometimes cut off the hands of those who had not collected enough. To the BaLese, the most logical motive for the amputations was that bazungu were cannibals, as the BaLese's other enemies were.

I started to fade, listening to wonderful-sounding stories I couldn't make head or tail of, but suddenly there was a great shout and everyone in the baraza jumped up. Andalita grabbed a burning log from the fire and clubbed something on the ground.  It looked like a scorpion, but was another arthropod-a long-tailed thirty-legged centipede. Gamaembi said that it had been attracted to the fire, and that its bite could paralyze you for days, or even kill a child.

When we hit the trail for Moto Moto the next day, Gamaembi, who was in the lead, and was breathing faint, evanescent plumes of steam into the morning coolness and parting wet cobwebs with his forehead, turned around and said, "There will be a story in Mangiese about the muzungu who came and played the guitar and one of his strings broke." I had given Andalita a roll of nylon cord, although Bob Bailey had advised me to go easy with presents, saying, "Your presence will be enough of a gift."

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