'When we finally stumbled into camp that evening we had been walking for four hours, the last of those in the twilight of an Ndoki evening in Congo Brazzaville. It had been a nightmarish experience for Clarissa who was nursing her bad knee the whole time. The best moment had come in the last half an hour of the return journey. Just when we could sense that we were on the home stretch to the comforts of the camp, Gaston, our Benjele guide, had stopped dead in the path, some small noise up ahead alerting him to the presence of a nearby herd of elephants. Having bumped into me at the sudden stop, Clarissa whispered, “What now?”, only to be silenced by Gaston with a sharp “Shush!” And so we stood stock still, one behind the other, on the darkened pathway. What followed was a very alarming few minutes. As Clarissa gripped my arm to steady herself, I felt my nerves start to stretch like taught guitar strings. Spooky stories often have nocturnal forests as their setting and for a good reason -they really are frightening places in the dark. At that exact moment the forest became silent, the background hum of mosquitoes and the croaks of a million frogs replaced by an eerie silence. Then, from the distance, there came the distinct sound of an elephant letting out a sigh of air from it’s trunk, and I felt my awakened sense of alarm rise dramatically when I realized that the elephant was only ten yards ahead of us. A disturbing thought briefly crossed my mind. What would happen should we have to run, and if we somehow became separated from one another? However, those thoughts were cut short when the elephant scented us and then let out a low warning rumble. This was followed by the sound of snapping branches as the unseen elephant hastily put plenty of distance between it and us. Then a surprise! A magnificent elephant with two long and very beautiful tusks moved into sight briefly on the path ahead of us. Seconds later it moved on and then out of sight. Galvanized into action by its departure, several other unseen closer elephants took flight as well, crashing off through the forest amid a flurry of shrill trumpets and screams. Finally, when these sounds had died away into the distance, we set off again down the wet path towards our tiny makeshift camp. We had worked hard that day for our fleeting glimpse of the big-tusked Ndoki forest elephant.'

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