Ñ Five hours of sleepy bumping in the van brought us to Bukima, a village in the foothills of the Virungas which marks the point where the road finally gives up, and from which we have to travel on by foot.
Ñ Set a little way above the village, in front of a large square, was an absurdly grand ex-colonial building, empty except for an absurdly small office tucked into the back where a small man in an Army uniform pored over our gorilla permits with a grim air of bemusement, as if he'd never seen one before, or at least not for well over an hour.
ÑHe then occupied himself with a short wave radio for a few minutes before turning to us and saying that he knew exactly who we were, had been expecting us, and that because of our contacts with the World Wildlife Fund in Nairobi he was going to allow us an extra day with the gorillas, and who the hell were we anyway, and why had no one told him we were coming?
Ñ This seemed, on the face of it, to be unanswerable, so we left him to try and figure it out for himself while we went to look for some porters to help us with our baggage for the three hour walk up to the warden's hut where we were to spend the night. They weren't hard to find.
ÑThere was a large band of them gathered hopefully round our van and our driver was eager to know how many we needed to carry all our bags. He seemed to emphasise the word 'all' rather strongly. There was a sudden moment of horrible realisation. We had been so keen to clear out of Goma as fast as possible that we had forgotten a major part of our plan, which was to leave the bulk of our gear at a hotel in town.
ÑAs a result of this oversight we had more baggage with us than we actually needed to carry up to the gorillas.
A lot more.
Ñ As well as basic gorilla-watching kit - jeans, T-shirt, a sort of waterproof thing, a ton of cameras and tins of pears - there was also an immense store of dirty laundry, a suit and shoes for meeting my French publisher in Paris, a dozen computer magazines, a thesaurus, half the collected works of Dickens and a large wooden model of a Komodo dragon.
ÑI believe in travelling light, but then I also believe I should give up smoking and shop early for Christmas.
Ñ Hiding our considerable embarrassment, we chose a team of porters to carry this little lot up into the Virunga volcanoes for us. They didn't mind. If we were prepared to pay them to carry Dickens and aftershave up to the gorillas and back down again then they were perfectly happy to do it. White men have done much worse things in Zaire than that, but maybe not much sillier.
Ñ The trek up to the visitors' hut was strenuous, and involved plenty of stops for sharing our cigarettes and Coca-Cola with the bearers, while they frequently redistributed the bags of Dickens and computer magazines between themselves and experimented with different and novel methods of keeping them on their heads.
Ñ For much of the time we were tramping through wet fields of sago, and a foolish but happy thought suddenly occurred to me. We were walking through the only known anagram of my name - which is Sago Mud Salad.
ÑI speculated footlingly as to what possible cosmic significance there could be to this and by the time I had finally dismissed the thought, the light was fading and we had arrived at the hut, which was a fairly spartan wooden building, but new and quite well built.
Ñ A damp and heavy mist hung over the land, almost obscuring the distant volcano peaks. The evening was unexpectedly cold, and we spent it by the light of hissing Tilley lamps, eating our tinned pears and our single remaining bun, and talking in broken French to our two guides whose names were Murara and Serundori.
Ñ These were magnificently smooth characters dressed in military camouflage and black berets who slouched across the table languidly caressing their rifles. They explained that the reason for the get-up was that they were ex-commandos. All guides had to carry rifles, they told us, partly as protection against the wildlife, but more importantly in case they encountered poachers.
ÑMurara told us that he had personally shot dead five poachers. He explained with a shrug that there was pas de probleme about it. No bother with inquests or anything like that, he just shot them and went home.
He sat back in his chair and idly fingered the rifle sight while we toyed nervously with our pear halves.
Ñ Poaching of one kind or another is, of course, the single most serious threat to the survival of the mountain gorillas but it's hard not to wonder whether declaring open season on human beings is the best plan for solving the problem. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.
Ñ In fact the poaching problem is declining - or at least parts of it are. Four in every five of the gorillas alive in the world's zoos today were originally taken from the wild, but no public zoo would accept a gorilla now, except from another zoo, since it would be a bit difficult to explain where it came from.
Ñ However, there is still a demand for them from private collectors, and the unprotected Ugandan part of the Virungas is still a weak link. In September 1988 an infant was captured on the Ugandan side: two adult members of its family were shot dead and the young animal was later sold to Rwandan smugglers by a game warden (now in prison) for about L15,000.
ÑThis is the most destructive aspect of this sort of poaching - for every young gorilla captured, several other members of its family will probably die trying to protect it.
Ñ Worse than those who want to collect gorillas for their private zoos are those who just want to collect bits of gorillas. For many years there was a brisk trade in skulls and hands which were sold to tourists and expatriates who mistakenly thought they would look finer on their mantelpieces than they did on the original gorilla.
Ñ This, thank goodness, is also now declining since a taste for bone-headed brutality is now held to be less of a social grace than formerly.
In some parts of Africa gorillas are still killed for food, though not in the Virunga volcanoes - at least, not deliberately.
Ñ The problem is that many other animals are, and gorillas very frequently get caught in traps set for bushbuck or duiker. A young female gorilla called Jozi, for example, caught her hand in a wire antelope snare and eventually died of septicaemia in August 1988. So to protect the gorillas, anti-poaching patrols are still necessary.
Ñ There were two other people sharing our hut that evening. They were a couple of German students whose names I appear now to have forgotten, but since they were indistinguishable from all the other German students we had encountered from time to time on our trips I will simply call them Helmut and Kurt.
Ñ Helmut and Kurt were young, fair-haired, vigorous and incredibly well-equipped, and much better than us at virtually everything. We saw very little of them during the early part of the evening because they were very busy preparing their meal.
ÑThis involved constructing some kind of brick oven outside, and then doing a lot of coming and going with bowls of boiling water, stopwatches, penknives and dismembered bits of the local wildlife. Eventually they sat and ate their feast in front of us with grim efficiency and an insulting refusal to make any disparaging glances at all in the direction of our tinned pear halves.
Ñ Then they said they were going to bed for the night, only they weren't going to sleep in the hut because they had a tent with them, which was much better. It was a German tent. They nodded us a curt goodnight and left.
Ñ In bed that night, after I had lain awake for a while worrying about Murara and Serundori's casual propensity for shooting people, I turned to worrying instead about Helmut and Kurt. If they were going to be like that, then I just wished they hadn't actually been German. It was too easy. Too obvious.
ÑIt was like coming across an Irishman who actually was stupid, a mother-in-law who actually was fat, or an American businessman who actually did have a middle initial and smoke a cigar. You feel as if you are unwillingly performing in a music-hall sketch and wishing you could rewrite the script.
ÑIf Helmut and Kurt had been Brazilian or Chinese or Latvian or anything else at all, they could then have behaved in exactly the same way and it would have been surprising and intriguing and, more to the point from my perspective, much easier to write about. Writers should not be in the business of propping up stereotypes.
ÑI wondered what to do about it, decided that they could simply be Latvians if I wanted, and then at last drifted off peacefully to worrying about my boots.
Ñ Mark had told me before we went to bed that when I woke up the first thing I had to remember was to turn my boots upside-down and shake them.
