Authors: Richard Preston
“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.
Marburg-virus particles are tough. One would imagine they can survive for a fair amount of time inside a dark cave. Marburg can sit unchanged for at least five days in water. This was shown by Tom Geisbert. One time, just to see what would happen, he put some Marburg particles into flasks of room-temperature water and left the flasks sitting on a countertop for five days (the counter was in Level 4). Then he took the water and dropped it into flasks that contained living monkey cells. The monkey cells filled up with crystalloids, exploded, and died of Marburg. Tom had discovered that five-day-old Marburg-virus particles are just as lethal and infective as fresh particles. Most viruses do not last long outside a host. The
AIDS
virus survives for only a few minutes when exposed to air. No one has ever tried to see how long Marburg or Ebola can survive while stuck to a dry, surface. Chances are the thread viruses can survive for some time—if the surface is free of sunlight, which would break apart the virus’s genetic material.
I came to the top of the mound, reached out with my gloved hand, and touched the ceiling. It was studded with brown oblong shapes—petrified tree logs—and whitish fragments—pieces of petrified bone. The rock is solidified ash, the relic of an eruption of Mount Elgon. It is embedded with stone logs, the remains of a tropical rain forest that was swept up in the eruption and buried in ash and mud. The logs are dark brown and shiny, and they reflected opalescent colors in the beam
of my head lamp. Some of the logs had fallen out of the roof, leaving holes, and the holes were lined with white crystals. The crystals are made of mineral salts, and they looked evilly sharp. Had Peter Cardinal reached up and touched these crystals? I found bats roosting in the holes among the crystals—insect-eating bats, smaller than the fruit bats that clustered near the cave’s mouth. As I played my head lamp over the holes, bats exploded out of them and whirled around my head and were gone. Then I saw something wonderful. It was the tooth of a crocodile, caught in the rock. The ash flow had buried a river that had contained crocodiles. The crocodiles had been trapped and burned to death in an eruption of Mount Elgon. Full of killers, from the river to the sea.
I shuffled across razorlike slices of rock that had fallen from the roof, and came to a fresh elephant dropping. It was the size of a small keg of beer. I stepped over it. I came to a crevice and shone my lights down into it. I didn’t see any mummified baby elephants down there. I came to a wall. It was scored with hatch marks—elephant tuskings. The elephants had left scrapes in the rock all over the place. I kept going down and came to a broken pillar. Next to it, a side tunnel continued downward. I wormed into the passage, on my knees. It circled around and came out in the main room. I was boiling hot inside the suit. Drops of moisture had collected on the inside of my faceplate and pooled in the mask under my chin. My footsteps kicked up dust, and it rose in
puffs around my boots. It felt strange to be soaking wet and yet wading through dust. As I was climbing out of the passage, my head slammed against a rock. If I hadn’t been wearing protective gear, the rock would have cut my scalp. It seemed easy to get a head wound in the cave. Perhaps that was the route of infection: the virus clings to the rocks and gets into the bloodstream through a cut.
I proceeded deeper until I came to a final wall in the throat of the cave. There, at knee level, in total darkness, I found spiders living in webs. They had left their egg cases scattered about, hanging from the rock. The spiders were carrying on their life cycle at the back of Kitum Cave. That meant they were finding something to eat in the darkness, something that was flying into their webs. I had seen moths and winged insects pouring from the mouth of the cave, and it occurred to me that some of them must be flying all the way to the back. The spiders could be the host. They could catch the virus from an insect in their diet. Perhaps Marburg cycles in the blood of spiders. Perhaps Monet and Cardinal were bitten by spiders. You feel a cobweb clinging to your face and then comes a mild sting, and after that you don’t feel anything. You can’t see it, you can’t smell it, you can’t feel it. You don’t know it’s there until you start to bleed.
So much was happening that I didn’t understand. Kitum Cave plays a role in the life of the forest, but what the role is no one can say. I found a crevice that seemed to be full of clear, deep water.
It couldn’t be water, I thought, the crevice must be dry. I picked up a stone and threw it. Halfway down in its flight, the stone made a splash. It had hit water. The stone spun lazily downward into the crevice and out of sight, and ripples spread across the pool and died away, throwing reflections of my head lamp onto the wall of the cave.
I climbed over fallen plates of stone back to the top of the rubble pile, playing my lights around. The room was more than a hundred yards across, larger in all directions than a football field. My lights failed to penetrate to the edges of the room, and the edges descended downward into darkness on all sides. The mound of rubble in the center made the cave resemble the curving roof of a mouth. As you look into someone’s mouth, you see the tongue in front, lying under the roof of the mouth, and you see the tongue curving backward and down into the throat: that is what Kitum Cave looked like. Say
“Ahh,”
Kitum Cave. Do you have a virus? No instruments, no senses can tell you if you are in the presence of the predator. I turned off my lights and stood in total darkness, feeling a bath of sweat trickle down my chest, hearing the thump of my heart and the swish of blood in my head.
The afternoon rains had come. Fred Grant was standing inside the mouth of the cave to keep himself dry. The
askari
sat on a rock nearby,
bouncing the machine gun on his knees, looking bored.
“Welcome back,” Grant said. “Was it good for you?”
“We’ll find out in seven days,” I said.
He scrutinized me. “There appear to be splatters on your face shield.”
“Splatters of
what?
”
“Looks like water.”
“It’s just sweat inside my mask. If you’ll bear with me a moment, I’m going to get this suit off.” I took a plastic laundry tub—part of the gear we had carried up to the cave—and left it under the waterfall for a moment. When the tub was partly full, I carried it over to the elephants’ pathway, at the entrance, put it on the ground, and poured in most of a gallon of “bloody Jik”—laundry bleach.
I stepped into the tub. My boots disappeared in a swirl of dirt coming off them, and the Jik turned brown. I put my gloved hands into the brown Jik, scooped up some of the liquid, and poured it over my head and face mask. Using a toilet brush, I scrubbed my boots and legs to remove obvious patches of dirt. I dropped my bagged map into the Jik. I dropped my flashlight and head lamp into the Jik. I took off my face mask and dunked it, along with the purple filters. Then my eyeglasses went into the Jik.
I peeled off my green gauntlet gloves. They went into the Jik. I stepped out of my Tyvek suit, peeling the sticky tape as I went. The whole suit,
together with the yellow boots, went into the Jik. It was a stew of biohazard gear.
Underneath my suit, I wore a set of clothes and a pair of sneakers. I stripped to the skin and put the clothing into a plastic garbage bag—a so-called hot bag—along with a splash or two of Jik, and then put that bag into another bag. I washed the outsides of both bags with bleach. From my backpack, I removed a clean set of clothing and put it on. I put the biohazard gear into double bags, adding Jik.
Robin MacDonald appeared noiselessly in his sneakers at the top of the rocks at the mouth of the cave. “Sir Bat Shit!” he called. “How did it go?”
We walked down the trail, lugging the hot bags, and returned to camp. The rain intensified. We settled down on chairs in the mess tent with a bottle of scotch whisky, while the rain splattered down and hissed through the leaves. It was three o’clock in the afternoon. The clouds thickened to the point where the sky grew black, and we lighted oil lamps inside the mess tent. Peals of thunder rolled around the mountain, and the rain turned into a downpour.
Robin settled into a folding chair. “Ah, man, this rain never stops on Elgon. This happens all year round.”
There was a stroboscopic flash and a bang, and a lightning bolt whacked an olive tree. The flash outlined his face, his glasses. We chased the scotch with Tusker beers and played a round of poker.
Robin declined to join the game. I had the impression he didn’t know how to play poker.
“Have some whisky, Robin,” Fred Grant said to him.
“None of that for me,” he said. “My stomach doesn’t like it. Beer is just right. It gives you protein, and you sleep well.”
The rain tapered off, and the clouds momentarily lightened. Olive trees arched overhead in squiggles, their feet sunk in shadows. Water drops fell through the halls of trees. Mousebirds gave off flutelike cries, and then the cries stopped, and Mount Elgon became silent. The forest shifted gently, rocking back and forth. Rain began to fall again.
“How are you feeling, Sir Bat Shit?” Robin said. “Are you getting any mental symptoms? That’s when you first start talking to yourself in the toilet. It’ll be starting any day now.”
The mental symptoms were starting already. I remembered slamming my head into the roof of the cave. That had raised a bump on my scalp. There would be microscopic tears in the skin around that bump. I had begun to understand the feeling of having been exposed to a filovirus: I’ll be okay. No problem. The odds are very good that I wasn’t exposed to anything.