The story uncovers a misty kingdom—he climbed the volcanoes—as much as revealing the intimate details of the gorillas, with their food gathering, nest-building, relationships, their emotional lives. In the finest tradition of the old storytellers, is buried forever under half a mile of volcanic ash so nobody will ever be able to check the three explorers’ bold claims. This is an unforgettable sister story, one where social influences and a life in Africa have a profound effect on the characters.

Earth Resources Technology Services Inc (ERTS) is a Houston-based American corporation devoted to locating and extracting rare and precious minerals and resources for industrial use. It’s a long book – 150 years of history, addressed at a leisurely pace, takes up a lot of paper - but every chapter is a jewel. This was a refinement instituted three months earlier, after Travis learned that Army experiments with vocal cord surgery had altered voice characteristics precisely enough to false-positive Voiceident programs.Spies in the Congo is an excellent contribution to the history of intelligence, Africa, World War Two and Atomic Power.

Congo (1980; film 1995) weaves factual accounts of primate communication with humans into a fictional adventure tale about an aggressive species of gorilla. But the family legacy didn't amount to much: a few African masks on the wall and a dog named Mbwa (the Swahili word for dog). There have been a number of civil wars in the region known as the Congo including the massive Second Congo War (1998 to 2003). Because this expedition, led by Karen Ross of Earth Resources Technology Services (ERTS) in Houston, is the nth degree in hi-tech—portable computers, laser-beam navigation, satellite TV-hookup with Houston—and the juxtaposition of super-gadgetry with nature at its wildest is simply splendid. It was the kind of assignment you don’t forget, and when I moved to the Financial Times I continued following the larger-than-life dramas unfolding in Africa’s Great Lakes region.

But it fired the starting gun for the Scramble for Africa, luring the European powers to claim the continent's interior after centuries of nibbling round its edges.