The Hot Zone - Страница 2

Доступ к книге ограничен фрагменом по требованию правообладателя.

In the afternoon, it would have rained, as it usually does on Mount Elgon, and so Monet and his friend would have stayed in their tent, and perhaps they made love while a thunderstorm hammered the canvas. It grew dark; the rain tapered off. They built a fire and cooked a meal. It was New Year’s Eve. Perhaps they celebrated, drinking champagne. The clouds would have cleared off in a few hours, as they usually do, and the volcano would have emerged as a black shadow under the Milky Way. Perhaps Monet stood on the grass at the stroke of midnight and looked at the stars—neck bent backward, unsteady on his feet from the champagne.

On New Year’s morning, sometime after breakfast—a cold morning, air temperature in the forties, the grass wet and cold—they drove up the mountain along a muddy track and parked in a small valley below Kitum Cave. They bushwhacked up the valley, following elephant trails that meandered besides a little stream that ran through stands of olive trees and grassy meadows. They kept an eye out for Cape buffalo, a dangerous animal to encounter in the forest. The cave opened at the head of the valley, and the stream cascaded over its mouth. The elephant trails joined at the entrance and headed inside. Monet and his friend spent the whole of New Year’s Day there. It probably rained, and so they would have sat in the entrance for hours while the little stream poured down in a veil. Looking across the valley, they watched for elephants, and they saw rock hyraxes—furry animals the size of groundhogs—running up and down the boulders near the mouth of the cave.

Herds of elephants go inside Kitum Cave at night to obtain minerals and salts. On the plains, it is easy for elephants to find salt in hardpans and dry water holes, but in the rain forest salt is precious thing. The cave is large enough to hold as many as seventy elephant at a time. They spend the night inside the cave, dozing on their feet or mining the rock with their tusks. They pry and gouge rocks off the walls, and chew them to fragments between their teeth, and swallow the broken bits of rock. Elephant dung around the cave is full of crumbled rock.

Monet and his friend had a flashlight, and they walked back into the cave to see where it went. The mouth of the cave is huge—fifty-five yards wide—and it opens out even wider beyond the entrance. They crossed a platform covered with powdery dry elephant dung, their feet kicking up puffs of dust as they advanced. The light grew dim, and the floor of the cave rose upward in a series of shelves coated with green slime. The slime was bat guano, digested vegetable matter that had been excreted by a colony of fruit bats on the ceiling.

Bats whirred out of holes and flicked through their flashlight beams, dodging around their heads, making high-pitched cries. Their flashlights disturbed the bats, and more bats woke up. Hundreds of bat eyes, like red jewels, looked down on them from the ceiling of the cave. Waves of bat sound rippled across the ceiling and echoed back and forth, a dry, squeaky sound, like many small doors being opened on dry hinges. Then they saw the most wonderful thing about Kitum Cave. The cave is petrified rain forest. Mineralized logs stuck out of the walls and ceiling. They were trunks of rainforest trees turned to stone—teaks, podo trees, evergreens. An eruption of Mount Elgon about seven million years ago had buried the rain forest in ash, and the logs had been tranformed into opal and chert. The logs were surrounded by crystals, white needles of minerals that had grown out of the rock. The crystals were as sharp as hypodermic syringes, and they glittered in the beams of the flashlights.

Monet and his friend wandered through the cave, shining their lights on the petrified rain forest. Did he run his hands over the stone trees and prick his finger on a crystal? They found petrified bones of ancient hippos and ancestors of elephants. There were spiders hanging in webs among the logs. The spiders were eating moths and insects.

They came to a gentle rise, where the main chamber widened to more than a hundred yards across—wider than the length of a football field. They found a crevice and shined their lights down to the bottom. There was something strange down there—a mass of gray and brownish material. It was the mummified corpses of baby elephants. When elephants walk through the cave at night, they navigate by their sense of touch, probing the floor ahead of them with the tips of their trunks. The babies sometimes fall into the crevice.

Monet and his friend continued deeper into the cave, descending a slope, until they came to a pillar that seemed to support the roof. The pillar was scored with hatch marks and grooves, the marks of elephant tusks. If the elephants continued to dig away at the base of the pillar, it might eventually collapse, bringing down the roof of Kitum Cave with it. At the back of the cave, they found another pillar. This one was broken. Over it hung a velvety mass of bats, which had fouled the pillar with black guano—a different kind of guano from the green slime near the mouth of the cave. These bats were insect eaters, and the guano was an ooze of digested insects. Did Monet put his hand in the ooze?

Monet’s friend dropped out of sight for several years after that trip to Mount Elgon. Then, unexpectedly, she surfaced in a bar in Mombasa, where she was working as a prostitute. A Kenyan doctor who had investigated the Monet case happened to be drinking a beer in the bar, and he struck up an idle conversation with her and mentioned Monet’s name. He was stunned when she said, “I know about that. I come from western Kenya. I was the woman with Charles Monet.” He didn’t believe her, but she told him the story in enough detail that he became convinced she was telling the truth. She vanished after that meeting in the bar, lost in the warrens of Mombasa, and by now she has probably died of AIDS.

Charles Monet returned to his job at the pump house at the sugar factory. He walked to work each day across the burned cane fields, no doubt admiring the view of Mount Elgon, and when the mountain was buried in clouds, perhaps he could still feel its pull, like the gravity of an invisible planet. Meanwhile, something was making copies of itself inside Monet. A life form had acquired Charles Monet as a host, and it was replicating.

The headache begins, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the agent. On the seventh day after his New Year’s visit to Kitum Cave—January 8, 1980—Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs. He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper, Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really did not know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became nauseated, spiked a fever, and began to vomit. His vomiting grew intense and turned into dry heaves. At the same time, he became strangely passive. His face lost all appearance of life and set itself into an expressionless mask, with the eyeballs fixed, paralytic, and staring. The eyelids were slightly droopy, which gave him a peculiar appearance, as if his eyes were popping out of his head and half-closed at the same time. The eyeballs themselves seemed almost frozen in their sockets, and they turned bright red. The skin of his face turned yellowish, with brilliant starlike red speckles. He began to look like a zombie. His appearance frightened the temporary housekeeper. She didn’t understand the transformation in this man. His personality changed. He became sullen, resentful, angry, and his memory seemed to be blown away. He was not delirious. He could answer questions, although he didn’t seem to know exactly where he was.

When Monet failed to show up for work, his colleagues began to wonder about him, and eventually they went to his bungalow to see if he was all right. The black-and-white crow sat on the roof and watched them as they went inside. They looked at Monet and decided that he needed to get to a hospital. Since he was very unwell and no longer able to drive a car, one of his co-workers drove him to a private hospital in the city of Kisumu, on the shore of Lake Victoria. The doctors at the hospital examined Monet, and could not come up with any explanation for what he might have some kind of bacterial infection, they gave him injections of antibiotics, but the antibiotics had no effect on his illness.

The doctors thought he should go to Nairobi Hospital, which is the best private hospital in East Africa. The telephone system hardly worked, and it did not seem worth the effort to call any doctors to tell them that he was coming. He could still walk, and he had to get to Nairobi. They put him in a taxi to the airport, and he boarded a Kenya Airways flight.

A hot virus from the rain forest lives within a twenty-four-hour plan flight from every city on earth. All of the earth’s cities are connected by a web of airline routes. The web is a network. Once a virus hits the net, it can shoot anywhere in a day—Paris, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, wherever planes fly. Charles Monet and the life form inside him had entered the net.

The plane was a Fokker Friendship with propellers, a commuter aircraft that seats thirty-five people. It started its engines and took off over Lake Victoria, blue and sparkling, dotted with dugout canoes of fishermen. The Friendship turned and banked eastward, climbing over green hills quilted with tea plantations and small farms. The commuter flights hat drone across Africa are often jammed with people, and this flight was probably full. The plane climbed over belts of forest and clusters of round huts and villages with tin roofs. The land suddenly dropped away, going down in shelves and ravines, and changed in color from green to brown. The plane was crossing the Eastern Rift Valley. The passengers looked out the windows at the place where the human species was born. They saw specks of huts clustered inside circles of thornbush, with cattle trails radiating from the huts. The propellers moaned, and the Friendship passed through cloud streets, lines of puffy Rift clouds, and began to bounce and sway. Monet became airsick.