Lesson 5 – The Gorilla
The gorilla is something of a paradox in the African scene. One thinks one knows him very 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 he lives. Carl Akeley, the American naturalist, led two expeditions in the nineteen-twenties, and now lies buried 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.
ALAN MOOREHEAD No Room in the Ark
参考译文——大猩猩
在非洲，大猩猩真是个令人矛盾的存在。人们自认为很了解他。一百多年来，他被人类杀害、捕捉、监禁在动物园里，其骨架被堆放在世界各地的自然历史博物馆里。无论是科学家还是浪漫主义者，都对他很感兴趣。他和我们的祖先有着明显的联系（尽管可能不是严格意义上的科学联系），却是恐怖电影和冒险书中怪物角色的常客。
事实上，我们对大猩猩知之甚少。迄今为止，还没有一张令人真正满意的、在野生状态下拍摄的大猩猩的照片。没有一位动物学家，无论多么勇敢坚毅，能够在它生活的黑暗丛林中对它进行近距离、持续的观察。美国博物学家卡尔·阿克利（Carl Akeley）曾在二十世纪二十年代领导了两次大猩猩探险活动，如今却与他深爱的动物长眠于此。即使如此，他也未能搞清楚大猩猩的寿命、死亡方式及原因，未能确定其家庭群体的社会模式，也未能指出其智力的最终程度。所有这一切以及其他许多事情几乎都和一个世纪前法国探险家杜查伊（Du Chaillu）首次向文明世界描述这种动物时一样神秘。和喜马拉雅登山者脑海中萦绕着的那个令人恐惧的雪人一样，大猩猩依然让人难以捉摸。
注：博主在百度翻译的基础上校译而成
参考资料：
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