The Hot Zone

by Richard Preston

  Livin’ and a-lovin’

  And a-lovin’ and a-livin’—Yah!

  We stopped and bought roasted ears of corn from a woman standing by the side of the road with a charcoal brazier. The corn was hot, dry, scorched, and delicious, and it cost five cents. It was called a mealy.

  Robin chewed his mealy as he drove. Suddenly he grabbed his jaw and swore violently. “My tooth! Bloody hell! A filling came out! This arsehole of a bloody dentist!” He rolled down his window and spat corn and bits of metal filling into the wind. “Well, carry on. Three fillings, and they’ve all come out now. Carrie sent me to the man. Said he was a good dentist—hah!”

  He floored his Land Rover until it hovered behind Carrie’s Land Rover. The two vehicles were roaring down the highway as if they were attached to each other. He leaned out the window and hurled his gnawed mealy at his wife’s Land Rover. It bounced off her rear window. She didn’t seem to notice. We passed a sign that said: REDUCE ROAD CARNAGE—DRIVE SAFELY.

  Toward sunset, we stopped in the town of Kitale, at the base of Mount Elgon, to buy Tusker beers and charcoal. Kitale is a market town. The main market is situated along the highway leading into town, near an old train station built by the English. The highway is lined with towering blue-gum trees. Under the trees, on pounded dirt and among mud puddles from fresh rains, people set up stands for selling umbrellas and plastic wrist watches. Robin turned his Land Rover into the market and drove slowly through the crowds. A man shouted in Swahili, “You are driving the wrong way!”

  “Where are the signs?” Robin shouted back.

  “We don’t need signs here!”

  We parked and walked through the town, and instantly we were surrounded by pimps. One guy wore a white ski parka and said, “Do you want to go Kigawera? Yes? I will take you there. Come with me. Right now. Beautiful girls. I will take you there.” That might be the neighborhood where Charles Monet’s girlfriends had lived, who knows. It was rush hour, and crowds flowed on foot under the gum trees, past an endless line of small shops. Mount Elgon brooded over the town and the trees, rising to an undefined height, its profile buried in an anvil thunderhead, bathed in golden light. An edge of the mountain razored diagonally upward into the cloud. A silent flash traveled around the mountain, followed by another flash—chain lightning, but no thunder reached the town. The air was cold, heavy, wet, and filled with the sound of crickets.

  In our explorations on mud roads around Mount Elgon, we saw signs of the recent trouble: burned, empty huts that had once belonged to Bukusu fanners. Someone had warned me that we would hear gunfire at night, but we didn’t. Sickly banana trees leaned around the abandoned huts. The huts stood in fallow fields, studded with African weeds and shoots of young saplings. We made a camp in the same meadow where Charles Monet had camped. The cook, Morris Mulatya, dumped a sack of charcoal on the ground and built a fire, and put a metal teapot on it to heat water for tea. Robin MacDonald sat down on a folding chair and removed his sneakers. He rubbed his feet with his hands and then drew his knife from its sheath and began paring bits of skin from his toes. Not far away, at the edge of the forest that ringed our campsite, a Cape buffalo eyed us. Robin eyed the buffalo. “That’s a male,” he muttered. “Those are bastards. You’ve got to watch them. They’ll lift you. The Cape buffalo have killed more human beings in Africa than any other animal. Except hippo. Those swine have killed more.”

  I knelt in the grass and organized a row of boxes that contained space suits, decontamination gear, and lights. Smoke from the campfire curled in the air, which was filled with the clink-clank noise of safari tents being erected by the MacDonalds’ staff. Carrie MacDonald worked around the campsite, getting things organized, speaking Swahili to the men. A nearby stream tumbled out of a glade. Robin looked up, listening to birds. “Hear that? Those are turacos. And there’s a wood hoopoe. And there’s a gray mousebird; do you see that long tail?”

  He wandered down to the stream. I followed him. “I wonder if there’s any trout in here,” he said, staring into the water. “This could be good for fly fishing.”

  I put my hand into the water. It was ice-cold and bubbly but gray in color, clouded with volcanic dust, not the kind of water that would sustain trout.

  “Talk about fly fishing. Did you ever hear of fly fishing for crocodiles?” Robin said.

  “No.”

  “You put a piece of meat on a chain. A piece of meat this big. And the flies are all over the place! Now there’s some fly fishing! They stink, those crocodiles. You’ll be standing in shallow water, and they’ll swim up on you. And the water is muddy. And you can’t see them. And unless you can smell them, you don’t know they’re there. And then—pfft! They drag you down. End of story. You’re history, my man. Talk about Nature. The whole thing, if you think about it, is full of killers, from the river to the sea.”

  A young man in a beret and military fatigues knelt on one knee in the grass, holding a Russian assault rifle, watching us with mild interest. His name was Polycarp Okuku, and he was an askari, an armed guard.

  “Iko simba hapa?” Robin called to him. Any lions around here?

  “Hakuna simba.” No lions left.

  Poachers from Uganda had been coming over Mount Elgon and shooting anything that moved, including people, and now the Kenyan government required that visitors to Mount Elgon be accompanied by armed guards. The Swahili word askari used to mean “spear bearer.” Now it means a man who carries an assault rifle and who walks in your shadow.

  Kitum Cave opens in a forested valley at an altitude of eight thousand feet on the eastern slope of the mountain. “Whoof!” MacDonald said as we grunted up the trail. “You can smell the Cape buffalo around here, eh? Mingi buffalo.” Mingi: many. Lots of buffalo. Buffalo trails crossed the human trail on diagonals. The trails were wider, deeper, straighter, more businesslike than the human trail, and they reeked of buffalo urine.

  I was wearing a backpack. I picked my way across muddy spots in the trail.

  Polycarp Okuku yanked a lever on the barrel of his assault rifle, clack, ta chock. This action cocked the weapon and slotted a round into the firing chamber. “Especially in the rainy season, the Cape buffalo like to travel in herds,” he explained.

  The sound of a machine gun being cocked brought Robin to attention. “Bloody hell,” he muttered. “That toy he’s carrying isn’t, safe.”

  “Look,” Okuku said, pointing to a clump of boulders. “Hyrax.” We watched a brown animal about the size of a woodchuck run silkily down the rocks. A possible host of Marburg virus.

  The valley was cloaked in African olive trees, African cedars, broad-leaved croton trees, Hagenia abyssinica trees drenched in moss, and whiplike young gray Elgon teaks. Here and there grew an occasional podocarpus tree, with a straight, silvery shaft that thrust upward to an incredible height and vanished in the shifting green of biological space. This was not lowland rain forest, where the crowns of trees merge into a closed canopy, but an African montane rain forest, a particular kind of forest with a broken canopy, penetrated by holes and clearings. Sunlight fell in shafts to the forest floor, washing over glades where nettles and papyrus sparkled with wild violets. Each tree stood in a space of its own, and the branches zigzagged against the clouds and sky like arms reaching out for heaven. From where we stood, we could see farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. As the eye moved from the lowlands to the uplands, the farms gave way to patches of shrubby trees, to fingers and clumps of larger trees, and then to an unbroken blanket of primeval East African rain forest, one of the rarest and most endangered tropical forests on the planet.

  The color of the forest was a silvery gray-green from the olive trees, yet here and there, a dark-green podocarpus tree burst through the canopy. A podo tree’s shaft is lightly fluted and goes straight up, without branches, sometimes spiraling as it goes, and there may be a slight swing or curve in the shaft, which gives the tree a look of tension and muscularity, like a bent bow. High up, the podo tree flares
into a vase-shaped crown, like an elm tree, and the downhanging limbs are draped with bundles of evergreen leafy needles and are spangled with ball-shaped fruit. The podos were hard to see in the thickets near Kitum Cave, because they did not grow large in that valley, but I noticed a young podo that was seven feet thick and close to a hundred feet tall. I guessed it had begun to grow in the time of Beethoven.

  “What’s missing here is the game,” Robin said. He stopped and adjusted his baseball cap, surveying the forest. “The elephants have been all shot to shit. If they hadn’t been shot, man, you’d see them all over this mountain. Mingi elephant. This whole place would be elephant.”

  The valley was quiet, except for the remote huh, huh of colobus monkeys that retreated from us as we climbed. The mountain seemed like an empty cathedral. I tried to imagine what it must have been like when herds of elephants could have been seen moving through a forest of podo trees as large as sequoias: only ten years ago, before the trouble, Mount Elgon had been one of the earth’s crown jewels.

  The mouth of Kitum Cave was mostly invisible from the approach trail, blocked by boulders cloaked in moss. A choir of African cedar trees grew in a row over the mouth of the cave, and a small stream trickled down among the cedars and rained over the boulders, filling the valley with a sound of falling water. As we got closer, the sound of the waterfall grew louder, and the air began to smell of something alive. It smelled of bat.

  Giant stinging nettles grew in clumps among the boulders, and they brushed against our bare skin and caught our legs on fire. It occurred to me that nettles are, in fact, injection needles. Stinging cells in the nettle inject a poison into the skin. They break the skin. Maybe the virus lives in nettles. Moths and tiny flying insects drifted out of the cave mouth, carried in a steady, cool flow of air. The insects floated like snow blown sideways. The snow was alive. It was a snow of hosts. Any of them might be carrying the virus, or none of them.

  We stopped on an elephant trail that led into the cave, beside a wall of rock that was covered with diagonal hatch marks made by the elephants tusking the rocks for salt. The forests of Mount Elgon were home to two thousand elephants, until the men with machine guns came over from Uganda. Now the Mount Elgon herd has withered to one extended family of about seventy elephants. The poachers set up a machine-gun nest at the mouth of Kitum Cave, and after that the surviving elephants had learned their lesson. The herd stays out of sight as much as possible, concealed in valleys higher on the mountain, and the smart old females, the grandmothers, who are the bosses of the herd and who direct its movements, lead the others to Kitum Cave about once every two weeks, when the elephants’ hunger for salt overcomes their fear of being shot.

  Elephants had not been the only visitors to Kitum Cave. Cape buffalo had gouged footprints in the trail leading into the cave. I noticed fresh, green splats of buffalo dung, and Waterhuck hoofprints. The trail itself seemed to consist of a bed of dried animal dung. Other than the elephant herd, many different kinds of animals had been going inside Kitum Cave—bushbuck, red duikers, perhaps monkeys, perhaps baboons, and certainly genet cats, which are wild catlike animals somewhat larger than a house cat. Rats, shrews, and voles go inside the cave, too, either looking for salt or foraging for food, and these small mammals make trails through the cave. Leopards go inside the cave at night, looking for prey. Kitum Cave is Mount Elgon’s equivalent of the Times Square subway station. It is an underground traffic zone, a biological mixing point where different species of animals and insects cross one another’s paths in an enclosed air space. A nice place for a virus to jump species.

  I unzipped my backpack and withdrew my gear and laid it on the rocks. I had assembled the components of a Level 4 field biological space suit. It was not a pressurized suit—not an orange Racal suit. It was a neutral-pressure whole-body suit with a hood and a full-face respirator. The suit itself was made of Tyvek, a slick, white fabric that is resistant to moisture and dust. I laid out a pair of green rubber gauntlet gloves, yellow rubber boots, a black mask with twin purple filters. The mask was a silicone rubber North respirator mask with a Lexan faceplate, for good visibility, and the purple filters were the kind that stop a virus. The mask had an insectile appearance, and the rubber was black and wet looking, sinister. I placed a roll of sticky tape on the rocks. A plastic shower cap—ten cents apiece at Woolworth’s. Flashlight, head lamp. I stepped into the suit, feet first, pulled it up to my armpits, and fed my arms into the sleeves. I stretched the shower cap over my head and then pulled the hood of the suit down over the shower cap. I zipped up the front zipper of the suit, from crotch to chin.

  Generally you need a support team to help you put on a field biological suit, and my traveling companion Fred Grant was acting in this capacity. “Could you hand me the sticky tape?” I said to him.

  I taped the front zipper of the suit, taped the wrists of my gloves to the suit, taped the cuffs of the boots to the suit.

  Polycarp Okuku sat on a rock with his gun across his knees, gazing at me with a carefully neutral expression on his face. It was evident that he did not want anyone to think he was surprised that someone would put on a space suit to go inside Kitum Cave. Later he turned and spoke at length in Swahili with Robin MacDonald.

  Robin turned to me. “He wants to know how many people have died in the cave.”

  “Two,” I said. “Not in the cave—they died afterward. One was a man, and the other was a boy.”

  Okuku nodded.

  “There’s very little danger,” I said. “I’m just being careful.”

  Robin scuffed his sneaker in the dirt. He turned to the askari and said, “You explode, man. You get it, and that’s it—pfft!—end of story. You can kiss your arse good-bye.”

  “I have heard about this virus,” Okuku said. “There was something the Americans did at this place.”

  “Were you working here then?” I asked. When Gene Johnson and his team came.

  “I was not here then,” Okuku said. “We heard about it.”

  I fitted the mask over my face. I could hear my breath sucking in through the filters and hissing out through the mask’s exhaust ports. I tightened some straps around my head.

  “How does it feel?” Fred asked.

  “Okay,” I said. My voice sounded muffled and distant to my ears. I inhaled. Air flowed over the faceplate and cleared it of fog. They watched me fit an electric miner’s lamp over my head.

  “How long are you going to be in there?” Fred asked.

  “You can expect me back in about an hour.”

  “An hour?”

  “Well—give me an hour.”

  “Very well. And then?” he asked.

  “And then? Dial 9-1-1.”

  The entrance is huge, and the cave widens out from there. I crossed a muddy area covered with animal tracks and continued along a broad platform covered with spongy dried dung. With the mask over my face, I could not smell bats or dung. The waterfall at the cave’s mouth made splashing echoes. I turned and looked back, and saw that clouds were darkening the sky, announcing the arrival of the afternoon rains. I turned on my lights and walked forward.

  Kitum Cave opens into a wide area of fallen rock. In 1982, a couple of years after Charles Monet visited the cave, the roof fell in. The collapse shattered and crushed a pillar that had once seemed to support the roof of the cave, leaving a pile of rubble more than a hundred yards across, and a new roof was formed over the rubble. I carried a map inside a plastic waterproof bag. The bag was to protect the map, to keep it from picking up any virus. I could wash the bag in bleach without ruining the map. The map had been drawn by an Englishman named Ian Redmond, an expert on elephants who once lived inside Kitum Cave for three months, camping beside a rock near the entrance while he observed the elephants coming and going at night. He wore no biohazard gear and remained healthy. (Later, when I told Peter Jahrling of USAMRIID about Redmond’s camp-out inside Kitum Cave, he said to me, in all seriousness, “Is there any way you could get me
a little bit of his blood, so we can run some tests on it?”)

  It was Ian Redmond who conceived the interesting idea that Kitum Cave was carved by elephants. Mother elephants teach their young how to pry the rocks for salt—rock carving is a learned behavior in elephants, not instinctive, taught to children by their parents; this knowledge has been passed down through generations of elephants for perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, for perhaps longer than modern humans have existed on the earth. If the elephants have been tusking out the rock of Kitum Cave at a rate of a few pounds a night, the cave could easily have been carved by elephants over a few hundred thousand years. Ian Redmond figured this out. He calls it speleogenesis by elephants—the creation of a cave by elephants.

  The light began to fade, and the mouth of the cave, behind me, became a crescent of sunlight against the high, fallen ceiling. Now the mouth looked like a half-moon. I came to a zone of bat roosts. These were fruit bats. My lights disturbed them, and they dropped off the ceiling and flitted past my head, giving off sounds that resembled Munchkin laughter. The rocks below the bats were slubbered with wet, greasy guano, a spinach-green paste speckled with gray blobs, which reminded me of oysters Rockefeller. Momentarily and unaccountably, I wondered what the bat guano would taste like. I thrust away this thought. It was the mind’s mischief. You should avoid eating shit when you are in Level 4.

  Beyond the bat roosts, the cave became drier and dustier. A dry, dusty cave is very unusual. Most caves are wet, since most caves are carved by water. There was no sign of running water in this cave, no streambed, no stalactites. It was an enormous, bone-dry hole in the side of Mount Elgon. Viruses like dry air and dust and darkness, and most of them don’t survive long when exposed to moisture and sunlight. Thus a dry cave is a good place for a virus to be preserved, for it to lie inactive in dung or in drying urine, or even, perhaps, for it to drift in cool, lightless, nearly motionless air.