Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 158, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1918 — Opaki Hard to Capture. [ARTICLE]

Opaki Hard to Capture.

The home of the opaki, in the western half of equatorial Africa, is a forest cloister 600 miles long, 180 miles wide and 700 miles from the coast — o a dismal and inhospitable region of unbroken. Wilderness. Into this retreat, inhabited by cannibals, strewn with the graves of thousands of white men and visited almost daily with terrific tropical thunderstorms, with Intervals of intense and humid heat from a torrid sun', the Lang-Chapin expedition ventured in 1909. For six years its members stalked the opaki, a mysterious creature, nocturnal in its habits,, with a sense of hearing Inconceivably acute, and so w’ary that only one specimen had ever been obtained. Few white men had ever seen an opaki, but, thanks to the determined efforts of Sir Harry Johnston, the gifted explorer and colonial administrator, the British museum was in possession of the remains of one of these animal recluses.