The Virus

by Stanley Johnson

  They breakfasted by the lake that first day and took the opportunity to consult the map which Ngenzi had brought with him.

  The Professor sounded apologetic. “I’m afraid it’s more an explorer’s chart than a proper map. In fact I rather doubt if it’s been updated since Stanley himself passed this way. But it’s all we’ve got. We’ll have to do the best we can with it.”

  Stephanie looked over his shoulder.

  “It seems as though the particular place we’re aiming for, going by the map reference I had from Kaplan, is somewhere on this tributary of the Ruzizi.” She peered closer. “It seems to be called the Uzizi.”

  Ngenzi examined the map closely. “As far as I can tell from the contours, we ought to be looking for a valley somewhere around the 2000 foot level. The Uzizi appears to pass through a kind of defile on entering the valley. See here” — he pointed with his finger at the map — “the contours are all bunched. The valley itself seems to spread out about half a mile on either side. It’s hard to tell what’s on the floor of the valley but my guess is that we’ll find grass as well as tree cover. On leaving the valley, the Uzizi once more appears to pass through a steep defile before running on down to join the Ruzizi.”

  As she listened to him speak, Stephanie did not find it difficult to visualize the abode of the monkeys. In her mind’s eye, she saw a green mountain valley and a sparkling river running through it. A valley as remote as any on the face of the earth. A valley where in some incomprehensible way nature had achieved both the perfection of creation and its nemesis. She remembered her dream.

  By the end of the third day Stephanie’s legs were aching, but she was enjoying herself immensely. To walk by day through the primeval rain-forest, where the immense canopy of trees towered overhead almost shutting out the sun; to make camp by night and sit around the fire till it was time to turn in, surrounded by people, like Michel Ngenzi, whom she knew and trusted; to hear these men talk of the forest and of the ways of the forest and of Africa past and present — all this was for her a profoundly moving experience.

  That night the conversation turned to the Mulelists.

  “Who were they?” Stephanie asked.

  “They were followers of Robert Mulele,” Ngenzi told her. “He was a strange charismatic man who was one of the leaders of the rebels back in the ’sixties. His followers would go into battle in a half-drugged state. He tried to convince them that they were invincible, that they had only to point their fingers at the enemy and chant and shout and they would be victorious. Mulele’s influence was particularly strong in this part of the Eastern Congo. Even today the Zairian army from time to time announces the capture and execution of Mulelists whom they will have rounded up in some drive through the jungle.”

  “What happened to Mulele himself?”

  “He was murdered one night in Elisabethville. They chopped up his body into about a thousand pieces.”

  Stephanie shivered. It was a harsh country. Justice was the law of the strongest. Almost as though to make her point, a mountain lion roared nearby. Instinctively they gathered closer to the camp fire.

  By the end of the next day’s march, they were about ten miles short of their destination. Ngenzi decided to send out a scouting party. He turned to two of his men and addressed them in their native language.

  “You two, Thomas and Edouard, I want you to find the best path to the Uzizi. If you locate the valley, try to discover the way down. Get back here by nightfall tomorrow. We’ll wait for you.”

  The two men left that night, slipping quietly off into the forest with no more luggage than loin-cloth and panga.

  Stephanie welcomed the break while they waited for the two men to return. She washed her hair in a stream and felt better. While she waited for it to dry she talked, in French, to Kodjo whom she now thought of as the “monkey man”.

  “How come you know so much about monkeys and apes, Kodjo?”

  Kodjo smiled at her. He had a warm trusting face and he was delighted that the white woman, Stephanie, wanted to converse with him. At home in his village he might have a wife and child, but at heart he was still a boy. His movements, his gestures were lithe like a boy’s.

  “I grew up near the ridge, miss. There was a tribe of monkeys there. They were my friends.” He spoke the last words simply, a matter-of-fact statement.

  “You mean the Nile-Zaire ridge in Burundi?” Stephanie remembered the great forest-clad crests she had seen from the air the day she flew in to Bujumbura.

  “Yes, miss. My village is two hundred miles north of Bujumbura. It lies at the foot of the highest summit of the Nile-Zaire ridge. Our fields have crept part of the way up the side of the mountain. We have burned the trees, cultivated the land. But the monkeys are still there at the top of Lwungi.”

  “Lwungi?”

  “That is the name of the mountain above my village,” Kodjo explained. “It is one of the sacred places. The kings of Burundi are buried up there on the summit among the trees. Our kings are always buried in the sacred groves. That is why we will never go further up the mountain. To do so would be to violate the spirit, the ‘mwami’ of our royal ancestors.”

  Stephanie nodded. She had heard much about the traditions of kingship.

  “I hope I have a chance to visit your village one day.”

  Kodjo was honoured. “I will take you to my village, miss. We make ‘mwemba’ for you!”

  “I thought ‘mwemba’ was for when someone had had a baby.”

  “Oh, there are different kinds of ‘mwemba’!”

  “I’m not surprised.” She laughed.

  Later that afternoon, Stephanie saw that Michel Ngenzi was looking worried. A frown creased the tall gentle face.

  “My men should be back by now,” he told her. “I can’t understand what’s kept them.”

  At dawn the next day, when the two scouts still hadn’t returned, Ngenzi’s concern had deepened into real anxiety.

  “We’re going to go on. But we’re going to move very cautiously. I have a feeling that something’s gone wrong.”

  Colonel Albert Mugambu had established his base of operations on the rim of the saucer. From where he sat he could look onto the valley-floor. Two-thirds drunk though he was, he could nevertheless detect that the scene held a certain appeal. The expanses below contained a fair number of trees, but they were by no means totally forested. The long grasses probably concealed lion, or even cheetah. Mugambu hoped that when this monkey-business was over he would be able to have a go at some “real” game. He rather fancied slinging a cheetah skin across his shoulder or, better still, having one made into a forage cap as President Mobutu himself had done.

  He was reflecting on the various sartorial possibilities, when a squad of soldiers emerged into his view.

  “What is it, Staff-sergeant?”

  Staff-sergeant Mlanga, who was in charge of the party, did a passable imitation of a salute.

  “Prisoners, sir!” The squad parted to reveal two frightened-looking Africans who, by the look of them, had been handled none too gently.

  “We were patrolling the rim of the crater when we found these two men,” Staff-sergeant Mlanga explained. “They were looking down into the valley.” And he added: “We think they may be Mulelists. But we haven’t interrogated them. We brought them straight in. We thought you would like to see them.”

  Mugambu’s interest was aroused.

  “Mulelists, eh?” He turned to Mlanga. “Thank you, Staff-sergeant. I think I’ll interrogate them myself.” He belched evilly, a drunken man scenting pleasure. “Take them out of earshot,” he ordered. “I’ll be along in a minute.”

  It was Ngenzi himself who found the bodies of his men. They had been thrown unceremoniously onto the track where it led to the rim of the crater. Already the flies had gathered and the stench of death was noticeable.

  “Mon Dieu!” Michel Ngenzi stopped in mid-stride. “Who the hell did that?” He turned to Stephanie. “Don’t look.”

&nbs
p; But Stephanie had already seen the broken bodies and the mangled limbs, and the sight appalled her.

  Ngenzi knelt down to examine the bodies more closely.

  “They were tortured,” he said in a voice choked with emotion. He was a man who flinched from violence, any kind of violence. Besides, the two men had been with him a long time. “But I think there was something else, besides torture.” Ngenzi continued. “Look at the expression on their faces.”

  Stephanie saw what he meant. There was a contorted agonized expression on each of the faces. She would not have believed such anguish possible.

  The bodies had been lying face up in the long grass. Ngenzi now gently turned them over and, as he did so, he gave a sharp exclamation. “Look, darts! Darts in the back. Poisoned darts. That’s what killed them.”

  Gingerly he pulled out a dart from one of the bodies. He examined it carefully. “No blood! No blood at all. The point of the dart is so fine that it can enter the tissue and flesh without breaking them.”

  “Don’t touch it,” Stephanie cried. She had a sudden terrifying vision of the Professor collapsing in front of her.

  “I’m not going to.”

  Ngenzi pointed to the brown stain on the tip of the dart. “It could be curare. The deadliest nerve-poison known to man. The South American Indians have been using it for centuries.”

  “Is it used in Africa too?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  Ngenzi examined the dart carefully.

  “This isn’t a native product, anyway. It’s a manufactured item.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  “I think it means someone has got there ahead of us,” Ngenzi replied slowly. “If you wanted to kill the green monkeys without creating conditions for further contamination, that’s what you’d use. High-powered darts, tipped with curare.”

  “Does that mean we’re too late?”

  “Maybe. Maybe they’ve already killed the monkeys.”

  “Do you think your men talked?” Stephanie asked. “Do you think we could be walking into an ambush?”

  Ngenzi regarded the remains of his scouts. He seemed quite certain of his reply.

  “No, I’m sure they didn’t talk.”

  Stephanie looked at the large black man whom she had come to love and trust as she had loved and trusted her father.

  “I think we should go on.” She spoke softly but there was determination in her voice. “What do the others think?”

  Ngenzi turned to his men. “Kodjo? Charles?”

  “We want whatever you want, boss. Only take care.”

  “We’ll bury the bodies first and then we’ll go on.”

  It took them two hours to bury the bodies. When they had finished, Ngenzi fashioned two rough crosses and placed them at the head of the graves.

  “Were they Catholic?” Stephanie asked.

  “Part Catholic, part animistic. In this part of Africa we have a tendency to mix up the different traditions.”

  He knelt in prayer and the others knelt with him.

  At last they moved on, still in single file.

  “We’ll make camp at the rim of the crater,” Ngenzi said. “Out of sight. We’ll wait. And we’ll watch. No fires. No noise.”

  They found a cave used by animals about one hundred feet below the rim of the crater. The entrance was about four feet across and two feet high but the cavity inside was large. Once they were installed within, they pulled grasses and fronds and branches into position to disguise the entrance.

  That evening, just before dusk, Ngenzi slipped out with a pair of binoculars.

  “I’m going to get down to the floor of the crater. I want to see if the monkeys are there.”

  “Be careful,” Stephanie urged him. “Think what happened to the others.”

  “I’ll be careful. Come with me, Kodjo.”

  Stephanie saw the brown forms of the two men slither into the long grass of the hillside below and, an instant later, disappear from view.

  Stephanie waited with increasing anxiety as one hour passed and then another. She used the binoculars but still could see no sign of the two men. Wherever they were, they were completely concealed by the natural cover.

  By her watch, two hours and ten minutes had elapsed before the men returned. Both were winded but Ngenzi, after the gloom which had seized him earlier with the murder of his scouts, was now in a visibly elated mood.

  “They’re beautiful.” He pulled himself inside the cave. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful.”

  Later, when he had rested from the steep climb back up to the rim of the crater, he told them about the monkeys.

  “They’re definitely guenons. But the most wonderful guenons I ever saw. Typical guenon markings. Agile. They were leaping from tree to tree as if they were flying colobuses.”

  “Colour? What colour?” Stephanie was anxious to pin it down.

  “Hard to say. Green or greenish, certainly. I didn’t get close enough. Frankly, I didn’t want to. I’m not protected with antibody-rich serum the way you are, Stephanie.”

  “How many?”

  “I’d say five hundred altogether. All in one place. In a clump of trees more or less in the middle of the crater.”

  “How much time have we got?”

  “Not much. We’ve got to move them soon, if we are going to move them at all.”

  They spent the night in the cave, huddled together for warmth. They could not run the risk of lighting a fire since they had no idea how close the “enemy” were. (Inevitably they thought of the other side as the enemy; now more than ever after what had happened to Ngenzi’s two native boys.) Stephanie found it hard to sleep. She was not naive by any means; in fact she had probably had a wider experience of life than most American women of her age. But she found it difficult to absorb the events of the afternoon and evening. She shuddered when she thought about poor Thomas and Edouard. Could it be, she wondered, that men like Lowell Kaplan were associated with such bestiality? Could he believe that the end, any end, justified those particular means? She thought back to the time she had spent with Kaplan in Paris. In so many ways, it had been good. But she felt a bitterness now towards the man, an anger which made her almost wish she had never met him.

  At last she drifted off to sleep to be awakened when Kodjo slipped out of the cave before dawn.

  “Where’s he going, Michel?” Stephanie was instantly alert.

  Ngenzi was crouched just outside the mouth of the cave watching the rim of the rising sun break over the lip of the crater.

  “He’s going to try to drive the monkeys out of the valley.”

  “All by himself?”

  “That’s all he needs.”

  From below they heard the bark of a chimpanzee. “There he goes,” said Ngenzi. “Kodjo’s on his way.”

  When he saw her look of astonishment, he explained: “The chimpanzee is the guenon’s historic enemy. It’s an old trick of the trappers. They imitate the bark of the chimpanzee to drive the monkeys in the way they want them to go. Monkeys will run from a chimpanzee when they won’t move for a lion. Kodjo’s an expert.”

  Stephanie nodded. She remembered the story Kodjo had told her about growing up near the monkeys on the summit of Mount Lwungi, on the Nile-Zaire ridge. What a coincidence that he should now be involved with another tribe of monkeys, only a couple of hundred miles west of his home ground!

  They heard the bark again, fainter this time. To the east, the sun rose red above the rim of the crater.

  Stephanie was about to follow Ngenzi out of the cave when she was brought up short.

  “Jesus!” The exclamation had escaped almost involuntarily from Ngenzi’s lips. As the sun rose, he had seen at once what they all, following his gaze, now also perceived. Along the crater’s rim, silhouetted against the rising sun, was a row of soldiers. They stood there motionless in the dawn light, the line of their helmets broken by crude attempts at camouflage.

  “They’re all around.”
Ngenzi whispered, instinctively lowering his voice. “They’ve got the crater surrounded. Back into the cave everyone!”

  As he spoke, they heard a shouted order and the line of men began to move slowly down the hill.

  They lay on their stomachs on the earth floor, peering out through the grasses which concealed the entrance to the cave.

  “The monkeys are in the trees each side of the river which runs more or less through the middle of the valley.” Ngenzi kept his voice to a whisper. “Kodjo’s only hope is to drive them down river towards the defile at the bottom of the valley and to hope that they can escape that way.”

  “And how will Kodjo escape?”

  “Kodjo will find a way.” Ngenzi spoke with confidence.

  The light grew quickly stronger. For Stephanie that was always one of the most noticeable features of tropical Africa. The day broke as quickly as it faded. They heard some soldiers passing quite close to the entrance of their hiding-place. Ngenzi clutched a long-handled hunting-knife. The rest of the party raised their pangas.

  Stephanie felt particularly defenceless. She had a sheath-knife from her Girl-Scout days and this she now grasped in a firm fist. But she wasn’t sure that she was ready to use it.

  At a range of less than ten yards, they were able to see the equipment which was being carried by each and every Congolese soldier.

  “My God,” Stephanie whispered as she saw the breathing apparatus, the pressure suits, the rifles. “They’re not taking any risks, are they!”

  Ngenzi put a finger to his lips. “Sh! There’re more to come.”

  Another party was passing the hide-out. They were equipped in the same way that the first party was, but this time there was a difference. The second squad consisted of two men only and both of them were white.

  Stephanie Verusio gave a start of anger as she recognized Lowell Kaplan. She hated him at that moment more passionately than she had ever hated anyone in her life. And to think that she had been to bed with the man! She almost spat in disgust. Tunnel-vision wasn’t the word for it. More like myopia. As he passed, she wanted to call out to him, to plead with him to stop the massacre which she knew was about to begin. Ngenzi laid a warning finger on her arm.