Authors: Richard Preston
The road to Mount Elgon heads northwest from Nairobi into the Kenya highlands, climbing through green hills that bump against African skies. It goes through small farms and patches of cedar forest, and then it breaks over a crest of land and seems to leap out into space, into a bowl of yellow haze, which is the Rift Valley. The road descends into the Rift, cutting across wrinkled knees of bluffs, until it hits bottom and unravels on a savanna dotted with acacia trees. It skirts the lakes at the bottom of the Rift and passes through groves of fever trees, yellow-green and glowing in the sun. It is detained in cities that dwell by the lakes, and then it turns westward, toward a line of blue hills, which is the western side of the Rift, and it climbs into the hills, a straight, narrow, paved two-lane highway, crowded with smoky overlander trucks gasping up the grade, bound for Uganda and Zaire.
The road to Mount Elgon is a segment of the
AIDS
highway, the Kinshasa Highway, the road that
cuts Africa in half, along which the
AIDS
virus traveled during its breakout from somewhere in the African rain forest to every place on earth. The road was once a dirt track that wandered through the heart of Africa, almost impossible to traverse along its complete length. Long sections of it were paved in the nineteen-seventies, and the trucks began rolling through, and soon afterward the
AIDS
virus appeared in towns along the highway. Exactly where the virus came from is one of the great mysteries.
The road to Mount Elgon was familiar to me; I had traveled over it as a boy. My parents and my brothers and I had lived for a short while with a Luo family on their farm in the hills overlooking Lake Victoria—a traditional farm, with mud huts and a
boma
for keeping cattle. I had not been back to Africa since I was twelve years old, but when you have encountered Africa in childhood, it becomes a section of your mind. I had felt warm river sand on my bare feet and had smelled crocodiles. I knew the crispy sensation of tsetse flies crawling in my hair. I could still hear the sound of voices speaking English in the soft accents of the Luo language, urging me to feel free, feel free, eat more fat from the ram’s tail. I knew what it felt like to wake up in gray light before dawn not knowing where I was, seeing a mud wall with a hole in it, and gradually realizing that the hole was a window in a hut and that I was being watched through the window by a crowd of children. When I saw Africa again, Africa came back whole, alive,
shining with remembered enigma. What came back first was the smell of Africa, the smoky smell of cooking fires, which produce a haze of burning acacia and blue-gum wood that covers the towns and clings to the bodies of people. What came back to me next, with a slap of recognition, was the sight of crowds of people walking along the roads as if they had been walking since the beginning of time, heading nowhere and everywhere by foot. In the highlands of Kenya, their bare and sandaled feet pound the shoulders of the highway into braids of red clay. The women sing Christian hymns as they walk, and some carry guitars, or they carry sacks of charcoal or salt balanced on their heads.
The Land Rover smashed through a pall of diesel smoke and bounced as it hit a pothole. Robin MacDonald, my guide, gripped the steering wheel. “Oh, this road is good, man,” he said approvingly. “Last time I was here, it was so bad you would be
crying
by now. I haven’t been up to Mount Elgon in years—not since I was a kid, really. My old man had a friend who had a shamba up there”—
shamba
, a farm—“and we used to visit him all the time. Oh, it was lovely, man. That farm is gone now. Eh, it’s
kwisha
.”
Kwisha:
finished. He dodged around a herd of goats, using his horn liberally. “Get out of the way, man!” he shouted at a goat. “Look, he’s not even moving.” The Land Rover roared and accelerated.
The road passed through small cornfields. In the middle of each plot stood a hut made of mud or cement. People stooped among the cornstalks, hand-tilling their fields with mattocks. Every inch of land lay under cultivation, right up to the doors of the houses. We passed a man standing by the road, holding a suitcase tied up with string. He waved to us. We passed another man wearing an English raincoat and a fedora hat and carrying a stick, walking slowly: a gray figure in bright sun. Some people waved as we passed, and others turned around in their tracks and stared at us. We stopped to wait for a herd of cattle crossing the road, driven by Kikuyu boys holding switches.
“Ay,” Robin said dreamily. “When I was a kid, this country was different, eh? To get anywhere in this country was a three-day trip. We shot a bloody Thomson’s gazelle and lived off the thing the whole time. In the old days, twenty years ago, this land was all forest and grassland. Now it’s corn. Everywhere corn. And the forests are gone, man.”
Robin MacDonald is a professional hunter and safari guide. He is one of about two dozen professional hunters who are left in East Africa. They take clients into the bush to hunt big game. He has a broad, ruddy face, thin lips, piercing eyes behind eyeglasses, and broad cheekbones. He has black, curly hair that hangs in pieces around his forehead, looking like he’d chopped it off with a knife. For walking in the bush, he wears a baseball cap, a black T-shirt, shorts, a curved African knife at his belt, and scorched, melted green sneakers—
dried too many times over campfires. He is the son of a famous professional hunter named Iain MacDonald, who was killed at the controls, of a light plane that crashed on the African plains in 1967, when Robin was thirteen. By that time, Robin had learned what he needed to know. He had hunted leopard and lion with his father, and he had already shot his first charging Cape buffalo while his father stood beside him to make the back-up shot in case he missed. Robin tracked elephant with his father for days through the dry thornbush of the Yatta Plateau, carrying nothing but a canteen of water and one apple—“That client, he was a guy from Texas, that guy,” Robin explained. “He said he could walk it no problem, said he was an experienced hunter. He sat down one day and said, To hell with this, I can’t go on. Make me a camp.’ So we made him a camp, and we went on, my old man and I, and we stalked the elephant for two days. My old man only took water when he was tracking an elephant. Said to me, ‘Stuff an apple in that pack, and we’ll be off.’ And then we walked across the Yatta Plateau for two days. When we found the elephant, we led the client to it, and he shot it.”
“How old were you then?”
“Seven, man.”
He does not hunt elephants anymore—he approves of the current worldwide ban on ivory—but he does hunt Cape buffalo, which is not an endangered species.
There had been reports of tribal violence
around Mount Elgon. The Elgon Masai had been raiding the Bukusu, an ethnic group whose people live on the southern side of the mountain, and had been burning their huts, shooting them with automatic weapons, and driving them off their land. I was concerned about the situation and had telephoned Robin from the United States to ask him his opinion.
“Where do you want to go? Mount Elgon?” he had said. His voice sounded hissy and remote on the line.
“I’m bringing a couple of space suits with me,” I said.
“Whatever, my man.”
“Is it safe to travel around Mount Elgon?”
“No hassle. Not unless there’s a bloody uproar.”
He lighted a cheap African cigarette and glanced at me. “So what are your plans for the cave? Are you going to collect any
specimens?
Any boxes of bat shit or the like?”
“No, I just want to look around.”
“I used to go up to that cave when I was a kid,” he said. “So there’s a disease up there, eh? Makes
AIDS
look like a sniffle, eh? You turn into soup, eh? You explode, eh?
Pfft!
—coming out of every hole, is that the story? And how long does it take?”
“About seven days.”
“Oof! Man. How do you get it?”
“By touching infected blood. It may also be airborne. It is also sexually transmitted.”
“Like
AIDS
, you mean?”
“Yes. The testicles swell up and turn black-and-blue.”
“What! Your guliwackers blow up? Lovely! So you get balls like a blue monkey! Christ! That virus is a bloody
shit
, that one.”
“You have given a good description of the agent,” I said.
Robin breathed his cigarette. He removed the baseball cap from his head and smoothed his hair and replaced the cap. “Right, then. You’ll go inside the cave and have a look at bat shit. And then—and then—after you
explode
in one of my tents, what shall I do with you?”
“Don’t touch me. You could get very sick if you touch me. Just roll up the tent with me inside it, and take the thing to a hospital.”
He crinkled with laughter. “Right. We’ll call in the Flying Doctors. They’ll pick up anything. And which hospital shall we have you delivered to, eh?”
“Nairobi Hospital. Leave me by the Casualty entrance.”
“Right, my man. That’s what we’ll do.”
The Cherangani Hills appeared in the distance, a line of mountains on the edge of the Rift, humpy and green, crushed under an indwelling sweep of rain clouds. The clouds darkened and gathered together as we approached Mount Elgon, and splats of rain began to hit the windshield.
The air turned cold and raw. Robin turned on his headlights.
“Did you find some bleach?” I asked him.
“I’ve got a gallon in back.”
“Plain laundry bleach?”
“Right. We call it Jik here in Kenya. Bloody Jik.”
“Is it like Clorox?”
“Right. Jik. Drink it, and it will bloody kill you.”
“I hope it kills Marburg.”
The country grew more settled, and we passed through towns. Everywhere we saw overlander trucks parked in front of shacks made of planks and metal. They were small restaurants. Some of them were full-service establishments, offering grilled goat, Tusker beer, a bed, and a woman. Medical doctors who work in East Africa believe that 90 percent of the prostitutes working along the main roads carry the
AIDS
virus. No one knows for sure, but local doctors think that as many as 30 percent of all men and women of childbearing age who live in the vicinity of Mount Elgon are infected with
HIV
. Most of them will die of
AIDS
. Many of their newborn children will also contract
AIDS
and die of the virus in childhood.
The emergence of
HIV
was subtle: it incubates for years in a human host before it kills the host. If the virus had been noticed earlier, it might have been named Kinshasa Highway, in honor of the fact that it passed along the Kinshasa Highway during its emergence from the African forest.
When I rode along the Kinshasa Highway as a boy, it was a dusty, unpaved thread that wandered through the Rift Valley toward Lake Victoria, carrying not much traffic. It was a gravel road engraved with washboard bumps and broken by occasional pitlike ruts that could crack the frame of a Land Rover. As you drove along it, you would see in the distance a plume of dust growing larger, coming toward you: an automobile. You would move to the shoulder and slow down, and as the car approached, you would place both hands upon the windshield to keep it from shattering if a pebble thrown up by the passing car hit the glass. The car would thunder past, leaving you blinded in yellow fog. Now the road was paved and had a stripe painted down the center, and it carried a continual flow of vehicles. The overlanders were mixed up with pickup trucks and vans jammed with people, and the road reeked of diesel smoke. The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War. In effect, I had witnessed a crucial event in the emergence of
AIDS
, the transformation of a thread of dirt into a ribbon of tar.
Robin’s wife, Carrie MacDonald, is his business partner, and she often accompanies him on safaris with clients. The MacDonalds also bring along their two small sons, if the client will allow that. Carrie is in her twenties, with blond hair and brown eyes and a crisp English accent. Her parents brought her to Africa from England when she was a girl.
We traveled in two Land Rovers, Carrie driving one and Robin driving the other. “We always take two vehicles in this country, in case one breaks down,” Carrie explained. “It happens literally all the time.” Carrie and Robin’s two boys rode with Carrie. We were also accompanied by three men who were members of the MacDonalds’ safari staff. Their names are Katana Chege, Herman Andembe, and Morris Mulatya. They are professional safari men, and they do most of the work around the campsite. They spoke very little English and had résumés as long as one’s arm. In addition to those people, two friends of mine had
joined the expedition. One was a childhood friend named Frederic Grant, and the other was a woman named Jamy Buchanan; both are Americans. I had prepared a written list of instructions for my friends in case I broke with Marburg, and I had sealed the document in an envelope and hidden it in my backpack. It ran for three pages, typewritten, single spaced, describing the signs and symptoms of a filovirus infection in a human being, as well as possible experimental treatments that might arrest the terminal meltdown. I had not told my friends about this envelope, but I planned to give it to them if I came down with a headache. This was a sign of nervousness, to say the least.
Robin turned into the opposite lane in order to pass a truck, and suddenly we were headed straight for an oncoming car. Its headlights flashed and its horn wailed.
Fred Grant grabbed the seat and shouted, “Why is this guy coming at us?”
“Yeah, well, we’re going to die, so don’t worry about it,” Robin remarked. He dodged in front of the truck just in time. He blurted out a song: