The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him well. For a hundred years or more he has been killed, captured and imprisoned in zoos. His bones have been mounted in natural history museums everywhere, and he has always exerted a strong fascination upon scientists and romantics alike. He is the stereotyped monster of the horror films and the adventure books, and an obvious (though not perhaps strictly scientific) link with our ancestral past.
Yet the fact is we know very little about gorillas. No really satisfactory photograph has ever been taken of one in a wild state; no zoologist, however intrepid, has been able to keep the animal under close and constant observation in the dark jungles in which it lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions to Uganda in the 1920s and now lies buried there among the animals he loved so well; but even he was unable to discover how long the gorilla lives, or how or why it dies, nor was he able to define the exact social pattern of the family groups, or indicate the final extent of their intelligence. All this and many other things remain almost as much a mystery as they were when the French explorer Du Chaillu first described the animal to the civilized world a century ago. The Abominable Snowman who haunts the imagination of climbers in the Himalayas is hardly more elusive.
The little that is known about gorillas certainly makes you want to know more. Sir Julian Huxley has recorded that thrice in the London Zoo he saw an eighteen-month-old specimen trace the outline of its own shadow with its finger. “No similar artistic initiative,” he writes, “has been recorded for any other anthropoid (类人猿), though we all know now that young chimpanzees will paint ‘pictures’ if provided with the necessary materials.” Huxley speaks too of a traveler seeing a male gorilla help a female up a steep rockstep, and gallantry of that kind is certainly not normal among animals. It is this “human-ness” of the gorilla that is so beguiling. According to some observers he courts and makes love the same way as humans do. Once the family is established it clings together. It feeds in a group in the thick bamboo jungles on the mountainside in the daytime, each animal making a tidy pile of its food—wild celery, bamboo shoots, and other leaves—and squatting down to eat it; and by night each member of the family makes its own bed by bending over and interlacing the bamboo fronds so as to form a kind of oval-shaped nest which is as comfortable and springy as a mattress. The father tends to make his bed just a foot or two from the ground, the mother a little higher, and the children are safely lodged in the branches up above.
When he walks the gorilla takes the main weight on his short legs and rests lightly on the knuckles of his hands at the end of his very long arms. When he stands upright a full-grown male rises to six feet, but with that immense chest he is far heavier than any normal man could ever be. Six hundred pounds is not uncommon. His strength is incredible—certainly great enough to take a man in his arms and wrench his head off.
Gorillas appear to talk to one another in high-pitched voices, not unlike those of women, or by smacking their lips or striking their cheeks, and the female, if alarmed, will scream. The male is capable of making a frightening demonstration in the face of danger. He stays behind while his family gets away, rising to his feet and uttering a terrifying roar. Sometimes he will drum on his chest and shake the trees around him with every appearance of uncontrollable fury. In extremity he will charge.
But all this is no more than shadow boxing as a general rule, for the gorilla is a gentle, kindly creature, a most forgiving ape who lives at peace with all the other animals, and his reputation for savagery and belligerence is nothing but a myth. When the animal charges, the thing to do is to stand your ground and look him in the eye. Then he will turn aside and slip away through the undergrowth.
1. Which of the following facts about gorillas does mankind know?
2. Which of the following words is closer to the meaning of “mystery” in Para. 2?
3. What does the author mean by saying “But all this is no more than shadow boxing” (Para. 6)?
4. We can learn from the passage that the author’s attitude towards gorillas is ________.
