From the vast island of Sumatra, where the hills rise up like a green sponge between the jade expanse of the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, Benedict Allen brings the strangest of traveller's tales...It was a man called Theodore Hull - a muscular octogenarian survivor of the Japanese prison camps - who lured him to the trail of the Gugu. A mangrove tangle of folktales leads him to the aboriginal Kubu who can guide him into the highlands where the enigmatic ape-people gibber and screech all night long, rattling every fibre of the forest. But the twentieth century is fast encroaching and the Kubu - driven deeper into the dwindling forest - say the Gugu are angry with a rage that can no longer be appeased bu traditional gifts of tobacco.Finding the last of the black-maned ape-men would fill a vital gap in the jigsaw story of humankind, and Benedict Allen ventures into the dark and living forest watched by unseen eyes and pursued by time, the ultimate destroyer of everything...
