BOOK REVIEW : Self-Styled Adventurer’s Colorful Quest for African ‘God-Beast’ : DRUMS ALONG THE CONGO: On the Trail of Mokele-Mbembe, the Last Living Dinosaur <i> by Rory Nugent</i> , Houghton Mifflin $21.95, 248 pages

The creature known as Mokele-Mbembe is a kind of sub-Saharan version of the Loch Ness monster. According to Rory Nugent, author of “Drums Along the Congo,” the beast is a dinosaur that supposedly inhabits Lake Tele in the Congo Basin of Equatorial Africa, “the lone survivor of the prehistoric animal kingdom that once lapped the lake water.”

Nugent is a self-styled adventurer who set out to find Mokele-Mbembe, and he gives us an intimate account of his quest in “Drums Along the Congo.” It’s the work of a seasoned traveler with a febrile imagination and a gift for telling a good yarn.

“An image of the god-beast . . . gradually comes to me,” writes Nugent, summoning up a moment when he was still waiting for travel papers in the bureaucratic jungle of post-colonial Brazzaville. “The long, thin-necked sauropod is holding court on the lush shores of Lake Tele. Monkeys adorn the god with liana necklaces strung with orchids and periwinkle; orioles, sunbirds, hawk eagles, coucals, swifts, trogons and parrots deposit fruit at its feet.”

Does he actually find the god-beast? Maybe yes, maybe no--even Nugent is not quite sure--but his book is much more concerned with the quest itself. Indeed, Nugent does not even reach the swampy habitat of Mokele-Mbembe until the book is mostly over, and by then he has already collected quite a few curiosities of an earthier kind.

Nugent is perfectly willing to admit that he has an overheated imagination and a severe case of wanderlust. “When I unpacked bananas in a supermarket, I imagined myself cutting them down deep in the rain forest,” he writes of his own youthful dreams. “Weeding lawns on Cape Cod, I conjured images of searching for rare jungle plants.”

“Along the Congo,” then, is a kind of childhood dream come true. Nugent undergoes an exorcism. He sacrifices to the spirits of the river--a slice of pineapple, a chocolate bar. He collects fetishes, hunts crocodiles and monkeys, dines on grubs and snake meat, and indulges his own passion for bird-watching, stargazing and butterfly-hunting.

Nugent is also a dedicated collector of what he seems to regard as the quaint and the colorful. Timber companies in Africa, according to Nugent, employ witch doctors to placate the displaced spirits that are believed to inhabit the forests. “Juju bags” full of charms and talismans are commonplace. When a bush pilot makes a dangerous landing on a jungle airstrip, the elders of the village approach him and ask him to take off and land again: “Everyone loves to watch the planes,” they say.

Even when Nugent detects the traces of Western pop culture in the folkways of contemporary Africa, he sees them as something charmingly misshapen. The weatherman on TV Zaire delivers the meteorological forecasts in amiable but unscientific phrases: “Nice, not so nice, not nice at all.” Nugent encounters various locals who “will, without prompting, re-enact every feint, jab and rope-a-dope maneuver” of the 1974 Ali-Foreman bout in Kinshasa. And when he tries to palm off Michael Jackson souvenir cards on a village shopkeeper, the enterprising merchant opens a trunk to reveal his own inventory of Michael Jackson memorabilia--and insists on payment in cash.

Some of the sights depicted in “Drums Along the Congo” have a sharper edge. A bartender in Brazzaville recalls how he used to concoct Molotov cocktails during the revolution: “A shot of the vermouth was the trick.”

A Mercedes dealer displays Maoist aphorisms on the showroom wall: “Party officials ask us to do it,” he explains. “And my best customers are generals and politicians.”

Meanwhile, street vendors sell cigarettes one at a time, and they are followed by hungry children with pocket lighters: “Two francs a light.”

Now and then, Nugent is even capable of poking fun at himself and his own tendency to conjure up magic where others might see only scenes of underdevelopment. When he visits a village mystic for advice on finding Mokele-Mbembe, he finds her bent over a bubbling caldron. After she pauses to read his palm, she returns to the task at hand and sprinkles white powder into the pot.

“Magic potion?” he asks.

“No,” she says, “the soup needs salt.”

Nugent is an agreeable travel companion, an engaging raconteur, and a man in the thrall of his own exotic dreams. “Along the Congo” may not prompt a rewriting of the paleontology textbooks, but it’s pleasant enough when approached as an hour or two of charming travel literature and armchair adventure.