The Hot Zone: Part Four

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.

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.

The emergence of HIV was subtle

it incubates for years in a human host before it kills the host.

The overlanders were mixed up with pickup trucks and vans jammed with people, and the road reeked of diesel smoke.

It ran for three pages, type-written, 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.

The huts stood in fallow fields, studded with African weeds and shoots of young saplings.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cape buffalo had gouged footprints in the trail leading into the cave.

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.

The mask had an insectile appearance, and the rubber was black and wet looking, sinister.

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.

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.

I came to a crevice and shone my lights down into it.

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.

The rain tapered off, and the clouds momentarily lightened.

The emergence of AIDS, Ebola, and any number of other rain-forest agents appears to be a natural consequence of the ruin of the tropical biosphere.

The emerging viruses are surfacing from ecologically damaged parts of the earth.

Many of them come from the tattered edges of tropical rain forest, or they come from tropical savanna that is being settled rapidly by people.

When viruses come out of an ecosystem, they tend to spread in waves through the human population, like echoes from the dying biosphere.

In a sense, the earth is mounting an immune response against the human species.

It is beginning to react to the human parasite, the flooding infection of people, the dead spots of concrete all over the planet, the cancerous rot-outs in Europe, Japan, and the United States, thick with replicating primates, the colonies enlarging and spreading and threatening to shock the biosphere with mass extinctions.

The AIDS virus may well have jumped into the human race from African primates, from monkeys and anthropoid apes.

A strain of simian AIDS virus was recently isolated from a chimpanzee in Gabon, in West Africa, which is, so far, the closest thing to HIV-I that anyone has yet found in the animal kingdom.

The fact that the virus mutates rapidly means that vaccines for it will be very difficult to develop.

I suspect that AIDS might not be Nature’s preeminent display of power.

Whether the human race can actually maintain a population of five billion or more without a crash with a hot virus remains an open question.

The answer lies hidden in the labyrinth of tropical ecosystems.

AIDS is the revenge of the rain forest.

I drove to the abandoned monkey house one day in autumn, to see what had become of it.

I looked inside and saw a floor mottled with reddish brown stains.

The flowers of Tartarian honeysuckle have no smell. That is, they smell like a virus; and they flourish in ruined habitats.

Ebola had risen in these rooms, flashed its colors, fed, and subsided into the forest.