Ñ Charles arrived in the Landrover along with Annette Lanjouw and we piled our stuff for the day into it and set off.
Ñ As we bumped and rattled our way out into the savannah once more, deep into the area where we had seen the rhino the previous day from the plane, I asked in a very casual, matter of fact, just out of interest kind of way, whether or not rhino were actually dangerous.
Ñ Mark grinned and shook his head. He said we'd be very unlucky indeed to be hurt by a rhino. This didn't seem to me entirely to answer the question, but I didn't like to press the point. I was only asking out of mild curiosity.
Ñ Mark went on anyway.
'You hear a lot of stuff that simply isn't true,' he said, 'or at least is blown up out of all proportion, just because it sounds dramatic. It really irritates me when people pretend that animals they meet are dangerous, just so it makes them seem brave or intrepid.
ÑIt's like fishermen's tales. A lot of early explorers were really terrible exaggerators. They would double or quadruple the length of the snakes they saw. Perfectly innocent anacondas became sixty foot monsters that lay in wait to crush people to death. All complete rubbish. But the anaconda's reputation has been damaged for good.'
Ñ 'But rhinos are perfectly safe?'
'Oh, more or less. I'd be a bit wary of black rhinos if I was on foot. They have got a reputation for unprovoked aggression which I suppose they've pretty much earned themselves. One black rhino in Kenya caught me off guard once, and severely dented a friend's car which I'd borrowed for the day.
Ñ He'd only had it a few weeks. His previous car, which I had borrowed for the weekend, had been written off by a buffalo. It was all very embarrassing. Hello, have we found something?'
Charles had brought the Landrover to a halt and was peering at the horizon through his binoculars.
'OK,' he said. 'I think I can see one. About two miles away.'
Ñ We each looked through our own binoculars, following his directions. The early morning air was still cool, and there was no heat haze frying the horizon.
ÑOnce I had worked out which group of trees in front of a tussocky hill it was we were meant to be looking just to the left and slightly in front of I eventually found myself looking at something that looked suspiciously like the termite hill we had almost killed ourselves tracking down two days earlier. It was very still.
Ñ 'Sure it's a rhino?' I asked, politely.
'Yup,' said Charles. 'Dead sure. We'll stay parked here. They have very keen hearing and the noise of the Landrover would send it away if we drove any closer. So we walk.'
We gathered our cameras together and walked.
'Quietly,' said Charles.
We walked more quietly.
Ñ It was difficult to be that quiet struggling through a wide, marsh-filled gully, with our boots and even our knees farting and belching in the mud. Mark entertained us by whispering interesting facts to us.
'Did you know,' he said, 'that bilharzia is the second most common disease in the world after tooth decay?'
'No, really?' I said.
Ñ 'It's very interesting,' said Mark. 'It's a disease you get from wading through infected water. Tiny snails breed in the water and they act as hosts to tiny parasitic worms that latch on to your skin. When the water evaporates they burrow in and attack your bladder and intestines. You'll know if you've got it, because it's like really bad flu with diarrhoea, and you also piss blood.'
Ñ 'I think we're meant to be keeping quiet,' I said.
Once we were on the other side of the gully we regrouped again behind some trees and Charles checked on the wind direction and gave us some further instructions.
Ñ 'You need to know something about the way that a rhino sees his world before we go barging into it,' he whispered to us. 'They're pretty mild and inoffensive creatures for all their size and horns and everything. His eyesight is very poor and he only relies on it for pretty basic information.
If he sees five animals like us approaching him he'll get nervous and run off.
ÑSo we have to keep close together in single file. Then he'll think we're just one animal and he'll be less worried.'
'A pretty big animal,' I said.
Ñ 'That doesn't matter. He's not afraid of big animals, but numbers bother him. We also have to stay down wind of him, which means that from here we're going to have make a wide circle round him.
His sense of smell is very acute indeed. In fact it's his most important sense. His whole world picture is made up of smells. He 'sees' in smells. His nasal passages are in fact bigger than his brain.'
Ñ From here it was at last possible to discern the creature with the naked eye. We were a bit more than half a mile from it. It was standing out in the open looking, at moments when it was completely still, like a large outcrop of rock. From time to time its long sloping head would wave gently from side to side and its horns would bob slightly up and down as, mildly and inoffensively, it cropped the grass. It was not a termite hill.
Ñ We set off again, very quietly, constantly stopping, ducking and shifting our position to try and stay down wind of the creature, while the wind, which didn't care one way or the other, constantly shifted its position too. At last we made it to another small clump of trees about a hundred yards from the creature, which so far had seemed to be undisturbed by our approach.
ÑFrom here, though, it was just open ground between us and it. We stayed here for a few minutes to watch and photograph it. If any closer approach did in fact scare it off, then this was our last opportunity. The animal was turned slightly away from us, continuing gently to crop the grass. At last the wind was well established in our favour and, nervously, quietly, we set off again.
Ñ It was a little like that game we play as children, in which one child stands facing the wall, while the others try to creep up behind and touch her. She will from time to time suddenly turn around, and anyone she catches moving has to go all the way to the back and start again.
ÑGenerally she won't be in a position to impale anyone she doesn't like the look of on a three foot horn, but in other respects it was similar.
The animal is, of course, a herbivore. It lives by grazing. The closer we crept to it, and the more monstrously it loomed in front of us, the more incongruous its gentle activity seemed to be.
ÑIt was like watching a JCB excavator quietly getting on with a little weeding.
At about forty yards distance, the rhinoceros suddenly stopped eating and looked up. It turned slowly to look at us, and regarded us with grave suspicion while we tried very hard to look like the smallest and most inoffensive animal we could possibly be.
ÑIt watched us carefully but without apparent comprehension, its small black eyes peering dully at us from either side of its horn. You can't help but try and follow an animal's thought processes, and you can't help, when faced with an animal like a three ton rhinoceros with nasal passages bigger than its brain, but fail.
The world of smells is now virtually closed to modern man.
ÑNot that we haven't got a sense of smell - we sniff our food or wine, we occasionally smell a flower, and can usually tell if there's a gas leak, but generally it's all a bit of a blur, and often an irrelevant or bothersome blur at that. When we read that Napoleon wrote to Josephine on one occasion, 'Don't wash - I'm coming home,' we are simply bemused and almost think of it as deviant behaviour.
ÑWe are so used to thinking of sight, closely followed by hearing, as the chief of the senses that we find it hard to visualise (the word itself is a giveaway) a world which declares itself primarily to the sense of smells. Its not a world our mental processors can resolve - or, at least, they are no longer practised in resolving it. For a great many animals, however, smell is the chief of the senses.
ÑIt tells them what is good to eat and what is not (we go by what the packet tells us and the sell-by date). It guides them towards food that isn't within line of sight (we already know where the shops are). It works at night (we turn on the light). It tells them of the presence and state of mind of other animals (we use language).
ÑIt also tells them what other animals have been in the vicinity and doing what in the last day or two (we simply don't know, unless they've left a note). Rhinoceroses declare their movements and their territory to other animals by stamping in their faeces, and then leaving smell traces of themselves wherever they walk, which is the sort of note we would not appreciate being left.
Ñ When we smell something slightly unexpected, if we can't immediately make sense of it and it isn't particularly bothersome, we simply ignore it, and this is probably equivalent to the rhino's reaction to seeing us. It appeared not to make any particular decision about us, but merely to forget that it had a decision to make.
ÑThe grass presented it with something infinitely richer and more interesting to its senses, and the animal returned to cropping it.
We crept on closer. Eventually we got to within about twenty-five yards, and Charles signalled us to stop. We were close enough. Quite close enough. We were in fact astoundingly close to it.
Ñ The animal measured about six feet high at its shoulders, and sloped down gradually towards its hindquarters and its rear legs, which were chubby with muscle. The sheer immensity of every part of it exercised a fearful magnetism on the mind. When the rhino moved a leg, just slightly, huge muscles moved easily under its heavy skin like Volkswagens parking.
Ñ The noise of our cameras seemed to distract it and it looked up again, but not in our direction. It appeared not to know what to think about this, and after a while returned to its grazing.
The light breeze that was blowing towards us began to shift its direction, and we shifted with it, which brought us round more to the front of the rhino.
ÑThis seemed to us, in our world dominated by vision, to be an odd thing to do, but so long as the rhino could not smell us, it could take or leave what we looked like. It then turned slightly towards us itself, so that we were suddenly crouched in full view of the beast. It seemed to chew a little more thoughtfully, but for a while paid us no more mind than that.
ÑWe watched quietly for fully three or four minutes, and even the sound of our cameras ceased to bother the animal. After a few minutes we became a little more careless about noise, and started to talk to each other about our reactions, and now the rhino became a little more restive and uneasy. It stopped grazing, lifted its head and looked at us steadily for about a minute, still uncertain what to do.
Ñ Again, I imagine myself, sitting here in my study writing this through the afternoon and gradually realising that a slight smell I had noticed earlier is still there, and beginning to wonder if I should start to look for other clues as to what it could be.
ÑI would start to look for something, something I could see: a bottle of something that's fallen over, or something electrical that's overheating. The smell is simply the clue that there's something I should look for.
Ñ For the rhino, the sight of us was simply a clue that there was something he should sniff for, and he began to sniff the air more carefully, and to move around in a slow careful arc. At that moment the wind began to move around and gave us away completely. The rhino snapped to attention, turned away from us, and hurtled off across the plain like a nimble young tank.
Ñ We had seen our northern white rhinoceros, and it was time to go home.
ÑThe next day Charles flew us back across the ostrich skin savannah to Bunia airport where we were due once more to pick up a missionary flight returning to Nairobi. The plane was already there waiting and a representative from the airline assured us, against the evidence of all our previous experience, that there would be no problems, we could go straight to the plane.
ÑThen, a few minutes later we were told that we would just have to go quickly to the immigration office. We could leave our bags. We went to the immigration office, where we were told that we should bring our bags. We brought our bags. Expensive looking camera equipment.
Ñ We were then confronted by a large Zairois official in a natty blue suit whom we had noticed earlier hanging around watching us take our baggage out of Charles's plane. I had had the feeling then that he was sizing us up for something.
Ñ He examined our passports for a goodish long time before acknowledging our presence at all, then at last he looked up at us, and a wide smile crept slowly across his face.
'You entered the country,' he asked, 'at Bukavu?'
In fact he said it in French, so we made a bit of a meal of understanding him, which was something that experience had taught us to do.
ÑEventually we admitted that, insofar as we had understood the question, yes, we had entered at Bukavu.
'Then,' he said, quietly, triumphantly, 'you must leave from Bukavu.'
He made no move to give us back our passports.
We looked at him blankly.
He explained slowly. Tourists, he said, had to leave the country from the same port by which they had entered. Smile.
Ñ We utterly failed to understand what he had said. This was almost true anyway. It was the most preposterous invention. He still held on to our passports.
Next to him a young girl was sitting, studiously copying down copious information from other visitors' passports, information that would almost certainly never see the light of day again.
Ñ We stood and argued while our plane sat out on the Tarmac waiting to take off to Nairobi, but the official simply sat and held our passports. We knew it was nonsense. He knew we knew it was nonsense. That was clearly part of the pleasure of it.
ÑHe smiled at us again, gave us a slow contented shrug, and idly brushed a bit of fluff off the sleeve of the natty blue suit towards the cost of which he clearly expected a major contribution. On the wall above him, gazing seriously into the middle distance from a battered frame, stood the figure of President Mobuto, resplendent in his leopardskin pillbox hat.
