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My magic carpet in this journey has been an absorbing new book by Linda Spalding entitled "A Dark Place in the Jungle."

"A Dark Place" presents a dense interweaving of travel narrative, natural history account and journalistic investigation. Spalding's tale begins in North America, where she becomes fascinated by the efforts of orangutan researcher Biruté Galdikas. Along with Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall, Galdikas is one of Louis Leakey's three "angels" -- protégées the anthropologist dispatched into the wilds of Africa and Indonesia to study primates and learn more about the origins of humans. Galdikas' mission was to live with the orangutans of Borneo, and to do this she moved to Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of the island, and built a research station called Camp Leakey, which Spalding terms "the last great site of primate research established by a woman and still in her charge."

Spalding's goal is to understand Galdikas' motivations and achievements: Why did she adopt the orangutans so passionately? What effect has her work had? What is life like at Camp Leakey today? What work is still being carried on there?

Spalding conceives this quest as a traditional "follow" -- which she defines as "a form of research in which the subject is observed from a distance, and in which a record is kept of the surroundings, noting moods of subject as well as environment." The twist, of course, is that in this case the subject of the follow is the original orangutan-follower herself.

As this follow unfolds, the trail becomes increasingly tangled and entangling. We come to learn that there are actually three jungles in this odyssey: There is the jungle of disagreement among well-meaning professionals over the best way to preserve orangutans and over the fundamental question of whether orangutans can be trained by humans to live in the wild (Galdikas' work is based on the belief that they can; other scientists and the Indonesian government have come to believe otherwise). There is the jungle of politics and economics where the fate of the great Indonesian forests -- and the fate of the orangutans and their would-be guardians -- is mapped and controlled. And there is the actual jungle itself -- the slippery, steamy, species-crammed place where wild orangutans still swoop gracefully from branch to branch and where our ancestors at some distant time dropped onto the ground and shuffled awkwardly into a clearing.

Spalding's follow gains another dimension when she decides to invite her two adult daughters along on her trip to Camp Leakey. This deepens and internalizes her journey, transforming it into an investigation not only of Galdikas but also of Spalding herself, of her achievements and failures as a mother -- and, on some subtler and larger level, an investigation of our entire species, of our achievements and failures on a grand evolutionary scale.

This is an ambitious subject, but happily, Spalding is a sensitive and eloquent observer who is able to bring the varied twists and trails in these jungles to vivid life. Her descriptions of village and research station, forest path and river trail, are rich and precise, and the scientists, officials, volunteers and villagers she encounters are drawn with respect and compassion. But what really distinguishes her tale are Spalding's introspections and connections, her ability to swoop gracefully from observation to speculation and revelation.

Next page | How orangutans see