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Concerning lions, Mr. Johnson said: "We came upon what was literally a virgin valley swarming with lions. They had never heard a shot fired, and treated us with the utmost indifference. Food for them was so plentiful that they even disdained the dead zebras we put out as bait, merely walking up and sniffing at the food we had provided. . . . Day after day, for weeks at a time we filmed them, getting them in groups and families of ten or fourteen at a time. Altogether we photographed 147 lions.
"They let us approach ridiculously close. Sometimes they were too bored even to look at us, and we had to whistle to attract their attention, though often the noise of the camera would bring them out of cover, from curiosity, to join those already before the lens. In all my experience I have never encountered anything more remarkable."
Within a few months, Mr. & Mrs. Johnson expect to set out for the Congo to film gorillas, okapi (large shy forest-dwelling herbivore, with bizarre stripes, as yet unphotographed).
Akeley. Three weeks ago, Mrs. Mary L. Akeley told the circumstances of her husband's fever last autumn on Mount Mikeno in the Belgian Congo (TIME, May 23). The Akeley expedition obtained and preserved 'gorillas, studied the scenery of their haunts, aided the Johnsons in photography. Soon, in the Akeley-African hall of the American Museum of Natural History will be many a tribute to the arduous work that hastened the death of Explorer Carl Ethan Akeley, scientist-explorer-sculptor extraordinary.
"River of Doubt." Commander George Miller Dyott, English explorer and writer, started up the Amazon River in Brazil last summer. At tantalizing intervals he informed the world, through his radio set, that he was alive. One message was broadcast from the headwaters of the Roosevelt River ("River of Doubt"). Five weeks ago, Commander Dyott arrived in Manhattan with a photographic record which substantiates the late Theodore Roosevelt's charting of this 900-mile river, running from the Brazilian plateau into the Madeira River, tributary of the Amazon. He saw stone markers which had been left by the Roosevelt expedition.
Snake-eaters, Bandits. "Robbed and maltreated by bandits. Have Nambikuara and Pareccis collections," said a cablegram dated May 5 at Sao Paulo, Brazil, from Francis Gow-Smith, explorer and ethnologist for the Museum of the American Indian (Heye Foundation). The Museum was relieved, having feared him lost in Matto Grosso (thick forest) Province, Brazil. He had previously been reported as having eaten Christmas dinner with Commander Dyott in an Indian village. He had described the Nambikuara Indians as: most primitive; eating only raw food (snakes included) ; wearing a macaw feather in their noses; and no clothes. Mr. Gow-Smith, more than six feet tall, onetime football stalwart at Purdue University, inspired awe in these Indians. Commander Dyott believes that the same bandits who annoyed Mr. Gow-Smith, also annoyed him.