The Hot Zone

PART ONE

The Shadow of Mount Elgon

PART TWO

The Monkey House

PART THREE

Smashdown

PART FOUR

Kitum Cave

Some people think I’m being hysterical, but there are catastrophes ahead.

—JOSHUA LEDERBERG

SOMETHING IN THE FOREST

New Year’s Day 1980

CHARLES MONET WAS a loner. He was a Frenchman who lived by himself in a little wooden bungalow on the private lands of the Nzoia Sugar Factory, a plantation in western Kenya that spread along the Nzoia River within sight of Mount Elgon, a huge, solitary, extinct volcano that rises to a height of 14,000 feet near the edge of the Rift Valley. It is not clear what brought Monet to Africa. As with many expatriates who end up there, his history seems a little obscure. Perhaps he had been in some kind of trouble in France, or perhaps he had been drawn to Kenya by the beauty of the country. He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but not of humanity in general. He was fifty-six years old, of medium height and medium build, with smooth, straight, brown hair; a good-looking man. It seems that his only close friends were women who lived in towns around the mountain, yet even they could not recall much about him for the doctors who investigated his death. His job was to take care of the sugar factory’s water-pumping machinery, which drew water from the Nzoia River and delivered it to many miles of sugar-cane fields. They say that he spent most of his day inside the pump house by the river, as if it pleased him to watch and listen to machines doing their work.

So often in a case like this, it’s hard to pin down the details. The doctors remember the clinical signs, because no-one who has seen the effects of a Biosafety Level 4 hot agent on a human being can ever forget them, but the effects pile up, one after the other, until they obliterate the person beneath them. The case of Charles Monet emerges in a cold geometry of clinical fact mixed with flashes of horror so brilliant and disturbing that we draw back and blink, as if we are staring into a discoloured alien sun.

Monet came into the country in the summer of 1979, around the time that the human immuno-deficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS, made its final break-out from the rain forests of central Africa and began its long burn through the human race. AIDS had already fallen like a shadow over the population of central Africa, although no-one yet knew it existed. It had been spreading quietly along the Kinshasa Highway, a transcontinental road that crosses Africa from east to west and passes along the shores of Lake Victoria within sight of Mount Elgon. HIV is a highly lethal but not very infective Biosafety Level 2 agent. It does not travel easily from person to person, and it does not travel through the air. You don’t need to wear a biological space suit while handling blood infected with HIV.

Monet worked hard in the pump house during the week, and during weekends and holidays he would visit forested areas near the sugar factory. He would take food with him, and he would scatter it around and watch while birds and animals ate it. He could sit in perfect stillness while he observed an animal. People who knew him recalled that he was affectionate with wild monkeys, that he had a special way with them. They said that he would sit holding a piece of food while a monkey approached him, and the animal would eat from his hand.

In the evenings, he kept to himself in his bungalow. He had a housekeeper, a woman named Johnnie, who cleaned up and prepared his meals. He was teaching himself how to identify African birds. A colony of weaver-birds lived in a tree near his house, and he spent time watching them build and maintain their baglike nests. They say that one day near Christmas he carried a sick bird into his house, where it died, perhaps in his hands. The bird may have been a weaverbird – no-one knows – and it may have died of a Level 4 virus – no-one knows. He also had a friendship with a crow. It was a pied crow, a black-and-white bird that people in Africa sometimes have as pets. This crow was a friendly, intelligent bird which liked to perch on the roof of Monet’s bungalow and watch his comings and goings. When the crow was hungry, it would land on the veranda and walk indoors, and Monet would feed it scraps of food from his table.

He walked to work every morning through the cane fields, a journey of two miles. That Christmas season, the sugar workers had been burning the fields, and so the fields were scorched and black. To the north across the charred landscape, twenty-five miles away, he could see the twin peaks of Mount Elgon. The mountain displayed a constantly changing face of weather and shadow, rain and sun, a spectacle of African light. At dawn, Mount Elgon appeared as a slumped pile of grey ridges receding into haze, culminating in a summit with two peaks, which are the opposed lips of the eroded cone. As the sun came up, the mountain turned silvery green, the colour of the Mount Elgon rain forest, and as the day progressed, clouds appeared and hid the mountain from view. Late in the afternoon, near sunset, the clouds thickened and boiled up into an anvil thunderhead that flickered with silent lightning. The bottom of the cloud was the colour of charcoal, and the top of the cloud feathered out against the upper air and glowed a dull orange, illuminated by the setting sun, and above the cloud the sky was deep blue and sparkled with a few tropical stars.

He had a number of women friends who lived in the town of Eldoret, to the south-east of the mountain, where the people are poor and live in shacks made of boards and metal. He gave money to his women friends, and they, in return, were happy to love him. When his Christmas vacation arrived, he formed a plan to go camping on Mount Elgon, and he invited one of the women from Eldoret to accompany him. No-one seems to remember her name.

Monet and his friend drove in a Land Rover up the long, straight red-dirt road that leads to Endebess Bluff, a prominent cliff on the eastern side of the volcano. The road was volcanic dust, as red as dried blood. They climbed onto the lower skirts of the volcano and went through cornfields and coffee plantations, which gave way to grazing land, and the road passed old, half-ruined English colonial farms hidden behind lines of blue-gum trees. The air grew cool as they went higher, and crested eagles flapped out of cedar trees. Not many tourists visit Mount Elgon, so Monet and his friend were probably driving the only vehicle on the road, although there would have been crowds of people walking on foot, villagers who cultivate small farms on the lower slopes of the mountain. They approached the frayed outer edge of the Mount Elgon rain forest, passing by fingers and islands of trees, and they passed the Mount Elgon Lodge, an English inn built in the earlier part of the century, now falling into disrepair, its walls cracked and its paint peeling off in the sun and rain.

Mount Elgon straddles the border between Uganda and Kenya and is not far from Sudan. The mountain is a biological island of rain forest in the centre of Africa, an isolated world rising above dry plains, fifty miles across, blanketed with trees, bamboo, and alpine moor. It is a knob in the backbone of central Africa. The volcano grew up seven to ten million years ago, producing fierce eruptions and explosions of ash, which repeatedly wiped out the forests that grew on its slopes, until it attained a tremendous height. Before Mount Elgon was eroded down, it may have been the highest mountain in Africa, higher than Kilimanjaro is today. It is still the widest. When the sun rises, it throws the shadow of Mount Elgon westward and deep into Uganda, and when the sun sets, the shadow reaches eastwards across Kenya. Within the shadow of Mount Elgon lie villages and cities inhabited by the Elgon Masai, a pastoral people who came from the north and settled around the mountain some centuries ago, and who breed cattle. The lower slopes of the mountain are washed with gentle rains, and the air remains cool and fresh, and the volcanic soil produces rich crops of corn. The villages form a ring of human settlement around the volcano, and the ring is steadily closing around the forest on its slopes, a noose that is strangling the ecosystem of the mountain. The forest is being cleared away, the trees are being cut down for firewood or to make room for grazing land, and the elephants are vanishing.

A small part of Mount Elgon is a national park. Monet and his friend stopped at the park gate to pay their entrance fees. A monkey or perhaps a baboon – no-one seems to remember – used to hang out around the gate, looking for handouts, and Monet enticed the animal to sit on his shoulder by offering it a banana. His friend laughed, but they stayed perfectly still while the animal ate. They drove a short way up the mountain and pitched their tent in an open clearing of moist green grass that sloped down to a stream. The stream gurgled out of the forest, and it was a strange colour, milky with volcanic dust. The grass was kept short by Cape buffalo grazing it, and was spotted with their dung.

The Elgon rain forest towered around their campsite, a web of gnarled African olive trees hung with moss and creepers and dotted with an olive that is poisonous to humans. They heard a scuffle of monkeys, a hum of insects. Flocks of olive pigeons burst from the trees on swift downward slants, flying at terrific speed, which is their strategy to escape from harrier hawks, which can dive on them and rip them apart on the wing. There were camphor trees and teaks and African cedars and red stinkwood trees, and here and there a dark green cloud of leaves mushroomed above the forest canopy. These were the crowns of podocarpus tress, or podos, the largest trees in Africa, nearly as large as a California sequoia. There were thousands of elephants on the mountain, then, and they could be heard moving through the forest, making cracking sounds as they peeled bark and broke limbs from trees. Colobus monkeys scuttled across the meadow near the tent, watching them with alert, intelligent eyes.

In the afternoon, it would have rained, as it usually does on Mount Elgon, and so they 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 backwards, 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 – Monet and his friend drove up the mountain along a muddy track and parked in a small valley below Kitum Cave.

They bushwhacked up the valley toward Kitum Cave, following elephant trails that meandered beside 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 Cape buffalo and waterbuck, and they saw rock hyraxes – furry animals the size of groundhogs – running up and down the boulders near the mouth of the cave.

They also watched for elephants. 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 a precious thing. The cave is large enough to hold as many as seventy elephants 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 flashlights, 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 upwards 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 was a petrified rain forest. Mineralized logs stuck out of the walls and ceiling. They were trunks of rain-forest 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 transformed 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 sticking out of the ceiling and walls. Bones of crocodiles, 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 shone their lights down to the bottom. There was something strange down there – a mass of grey and brownish material. It was the mummified corpses of baby elephants. When elephants walked through the cave at night, they navigated by their sense of touch, probing the floor ahead of them with the tips of their trunks. The babies sometimes fell 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 – the elephants had been tusking out the rock around the pillar, scraping at it, and chewing the rock to extract the salts. 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? Investigators who studied the case considered the possibility that he and his friend took off their clothes and made love, but the investigators were never able to determine whether this happened. If he removed his clothes inside the cave, he would have exposed a large amount of his skin.

The woman dropped out of sight for several years after that trip to Mount Elgon with Charles Monet. 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 – 8 January 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 taking her Christmas holiday, and he had recently hired a temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really didn’t know what to do. Then, on the third day after his headache started, he became nauseous, 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 and began to resemble Limburger cheese, 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. He acted as if he had had a mild stroke.

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 could no longer drive a car, one of his colleagues 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 had happened to his eyes or his face or his mind. Thinking that 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 seemed able to travel by himself. He had money; he understood 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 plane 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