Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm - Hardcover

Reel, Monte

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0385534221 ISBN 13: 9780385534222

Verlag: DOUBLEDAY & CO, 2013

Inhaltsangabe

The unbelievably riveting adventure of an unlikely young explorer who emerged from the jungles of Africa with evidence of a mysterious, still mythical beast—the gorilla—only to stumble straight into the center of the biggest debate of the day: Darwin's theory of evolution

In 1856 Paul Du Chaillu marched into the equatorial wilderness of West Africa determined to bag an animal that, according to legend, was nothing short of a monster. When he emerged three years later, the summation of his efforts only hinted at what he'd experienced in one of the most dangerous regions on earth. Armed with an astonishing collection of zoological specimens, Du Chaillu leapt from the physical challenges of the jungle straight into the center of the biggest issues of the time—the evolution debate, racial discourse, the growth of Christian fundamentalism—and helped push each to unprecedented intensities. He experienced instant celebrity, but with that fame came whispers—about his past, his credibility, and his very identity—which would haunt the young man. Grand in scope, immediate in detail, and propulsively readable, Between Man and Beast brilliantly combines Du Chaillu's personal journey with the epic tale of a world hovering on the sharp edge of transformation.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A former reporter for The Washington Post, Reel is the author of the critically acclaimedThe Last of the Tribe.

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Prologue
He’d been hunting in the forest’s depths for months, but he’d never known such silence. No monkeys shook the leaves over-head, no birds cried, no insects droned. The only sounds seemed to come from within: the pulse throbbing in his temples and his own labored breathing.

The previous day the young man had hiked what he guessed was about eighteen miles before collapsing into sleep. But those trails hadn’t been nearly as challenging as this one—a muddy ribbon twisting up the forested mountainside, inset with loose boulders of granite and quartz. He was in good shape and just twenty-five years old, but each step took its toll. He fell behind his companions, whose bare feet gripped the slippery rocks better than did his leather boot soles. His blue cotton shirt and brown pants were streaked with mud.

Somewhere along the way—it was hard to tell exactly where it began—the gentlest of whispers broke through the enveloping hush. The higher he climbed, the louder it got: a breathy hiss that grew into a roar. Twisting through the overgrown vegetation, he found the other men standing on a broad, flat shelf of land. A scene like none he’d ever witnessed burst open in front of him: a vast pool of swirling water, fed by a majestic torrent that spilled down the angled slope for what looked like a mile. A mist rose from the tumult, obscuring everything in a gauzy veil: the swaying ferns, the logs slanting across the water, the trees ringing the banks. According to his calculations, they were about five thousand feet above sea level.

He paused to drink from the pool, but his rest was brief. A short distance uphill, one of his companions spotted footprints that didn’t belong to their own party. The feet that had impressed those marks into the mud were bare—but oddly round, with a big toe that seemed to jut away from the other four toes at a severe angle.
When he saw the prints for himself, the hunter felt his heart slam against his rib cage: this was the target he’d traveled so far to pursue, and it finally seemed within his reach.

Following the tracks, the men stumbled into what appeared to be an abandoned tribal village. Years earlier, the land had been cleared for huts that had since collapsed. Stray stalks of sugarcane pushed through the ruins. As the hunter broke off a stalk and sucked the grassy sweetness from its marrow, another of the men observed that some of the plants had recently been ravaged—violently torn up by the roots and mangled into pulp.
They looked at one another and grabbed the rifles they wore strapped across their backs.

More tracks led down a hill. The men carefully crossed a stream on a fallen log, and on the other side of the water they encountered a cluster of enormous granite boulders, some as big as small buildings. The tracks here were even fresher, filled with muddy water that hadn’t had time to settle.
The hunter circled to the right of the boulders, while a few of his companions walked to the left. He emerged from the granite blockade just in time to catch an obstructed view of four dark creatures fleeing rapidly into the dense cover of forest.

The figures disappeared as quickly as they had exploded into view. Running with their heads down and bodies bent forward, the woolly creatures appeared to him, he later noted, “like men running for their lives.”
Just minutes before, he might have sworn that the mountain torrent had been the most awe-inspiring sight he’d witnessed in his young life. But this blurred vision of bodies in motion—gone in the blink of an eye—blew it away. 
 
 

Chapter 1: Destiny
 Gabon, West Africa
(Ten years earlier)
 
 
Late in 1846,  near the end of the rainy season, a group of men reached the Atlantic coast of Africa after weeks of slogging through the waterlogged interior. They had followed no maps, because none existed for that broad swath of equatorial forest. As far as the outside world was concerned, they had emerged from terra incognita—a pure white void in the atlas of the world.

But these men had been exploring the territory all their lives. They were native African traders, and they regularly made long treks from their inland villages toward the largest coastal settlement in Gabon, drawn to the European merchant ships that occasionally dropped anchor to strike deals. On this day, in addition to shouldering the customary bundles of ebony and ivory, the traders carried something extraordinary: a scavenged totem of beguiling rarity.
The American missionary who lived on the bluff wouldn’t be able to resist its pull.

His name was John Leighton Wilson, a man of towering stature whose quick smile often got lost inside his fleecy white beard. He had come from South Carolina to the coast of equatorial Africa years before to save the souls of men, but a large part of his own soul had been captured by the wonders that surrounded him. He could spend hours marveling over the elaborate nests of driver ants, or measuring pythons, or trying to tame a porcupine scrabbling near the door of his hut. For all his preaching to the locals about the evils of black magic, false idols, and tribal superstitions, he’d always been vulnerable to the charms of the exotic. And when he spotted the tribesmen’s strange curio, he fell under its spell, offering to buy it on the spot.

It was a skull.

At first glance, that calcified mask seemed the product of a peculiarly demented artistry, a grotesquerie of sharp angles and shadowy apertures. When Wilson took it in his hand, it sat heavily, with none of the driftwood airiness of old sun-blanched bones. Its diameter easily exceeded that of a human skull, but there was a passing resemblance, and that’s what gave the skull its power to unnerve.

The jaw alone was colossal, framing a mouthful of teeth that seemed to bare themselves in a sinister smile. A quick count revealed thirty-two teeth, the same number as humans, but four of them boldly hijacked Wilson’s  attention:  the twinned  sets of upper and lower canines, the largest more than two inches long, curving like scimitars. Those fangs appeared worn, but from what he could only imagine.

From the mouth, the facial bones that stretched up toward the eyes sloped back at nearly a forty-five-degree angle, interrupted along the way by a gaping round nasal cavity. From under a menacing ridge of brow, two dark holes stared out where eyes were once socketed. The cranial dome itself was oddly flat, too small in comparison with the rest of the head, as if betraying a brute ignorance that only intensified the promise of danger. The fact that no flesh remained on the skull to provide a more complete picture of the unknown creature’s appearance made it no less intimidating: the absence of detail somehow accentuated its eccentricity, in the same way that the most vivid nightmares need darkness to make themselves seen.

The natives called it a njena.

Wilson, who for years had been compiling the first-ever diction-ary of the local dialect, was unable to translate the term. Whatever the creature was, no words existed for it in English, or in any other language.
 
Wilson  believed  in destiny. Everything and everyone had a place in this world—every grain of sand, the fish of the sea, the fowl of the air, all that creepeth. No matter how pathetic, desolate, abominable, or forlorn something might have seemed at first, its mere existence meant that it was an indispensable part of a divine plan. And God saw everything  that He had made, and, behold, it was very good.

His faith kept him rooted in West Africa, a place that...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: DOUBLEDAY & CO
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2013
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0385534221
• ISBN 13: 9780385534222
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 331
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Doubleday; https://knopfdoubleday.com/imprint/doubleday/; ; Attn: Andrea T Sheridan 1745 BROADWAY, 14-1; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar