he been doing to get himself infected? Exactly where had he traveled?
These questions haunted Johnson. He had been trying to find the secret reservoirs of the thread viruses for years.
He telephoned a friend and colleague in Kenya named Dr. Peter Turkei, who was a scientist at the Kenya Medical Research Institute in Nairobi. “We know this is Marburg,” Gene said to him. “Can you get a history of the kid? Find out where he was and what he did?”
Dr. Tukei said he would locate the parents and interview them.
A week late, Gene’s telephone rang. It was Dr. Tukei on the line.
“You know where that kid was?” he said. “He was in Kitum Cave on Mount Elgon.”
Gene felt a prickling sensation on his scalp. The paths of Charles Monet and Peter Cardinal had crossed at only one place on earth, and that was inside Kitum Cave. What had they done in the cave? What had they found in there? What had they touched? What had they breathed? What lived in Kitum Cave?
GOING DEEP
Eugene Johnson sat at a picnic table at Fort Detrick near a duck pond, leaning forward and gazing at me. It was hot day in the middle of summer.
He was wearing sunglasses. He placed his large elbows on the table, took off his sunglasses, and rubbed his eyes. He was six foot two, maybe two hundred and fifty pounds. His eyes were brown and set deep in his bearded face, and there were dark circles under the lower lids. He looked tired.
“So Peter Tukei got on the phone to tell me that the boy had visited Kitum Cave,” Johnson said. “I still get chills when I think about it. A few weeks later, I flew to Nairobi, and I talked with David Silverstein, the kid’s doctor. Peter Tukei was with me. Then we went everyplace in Kenya the kid went, even to his house. His parents had a nice house in Kisumu, near Lake Victoria. It was a stucco house with a wall around it, and there was a cook and groundskeepers and a driver. The house was clean and neat, open and whitewashed. We saw that there was a rock hyrax living on the roof. It was a pet, and it lived in the gutters.
There were a couple of storks, and there were rabbits and goats and all kinds of birds. I didn’t see any bats around this house.”
He paused, thinking. No one else was around. A few ducks swam in the pond. “I was really nervous about talking with the parents,” he said. “See, I am a field person. My wife and I don’t have children. I’m not the kind of a guy who can console a mother, plus I work in the U.S. military. I had no idea how to talk to them. I tried to put myself in their place, and I remembered how I felt when my father died. I let them talk about their son, Peter Cardinal and his sister had been inseparable from the moment he arrived in Kenya. The kids had spent the whole time together, doing everything together. So what was the difference in behavior? Why did Peter Cardinal get the virus but not his sister? There was one difference in their behavior. The parents told me a story about the rocks in the cave. They told me their kid was an amateur geologist. There was this issue: did he cut his hand on any crystals in the cave? We went over that possibility with the parents, Peter had said to them that he wanted to collect some of the crystals in Kitum Cave. So he beat on the walls of the cave with a hammer and collected some rocks with crystals in them. The rocks were broken up by the driver and washed by the cook. We tested their blood, and they were not positive for Marburg.”
It seems possible that the point of contact had been the boy’s hands, that the virus had entered Cardinal’s bloodstream through a tiny cut. Possibly he had pricked his finger on a crystal that had been contaminated with urine from some animal or the remains of a crushed insect. But even if he had pricked his finger on a crystal, that didn’t tell where the virus lived in nature; it didn’t identify the virus’s natural host.
“We went to look at the cave,” he said. “We had to protect ourselves when we went inside. We knew that Marburg is transmitted by the aerosol route.”
In 1986—the year before Peter Cardinal died—Gene Johnson had done an experiment that showed that Marburg and Ebola can indeed travel through the air. He infected monkeys with Marburg and Ebola by letting them breathe it into their lungs, and he discovered that a very small dose of airborne Marburg or Ebola could start an explosive infection in a monkey. Therefore, Johnson wanted the members of expedition to wear breathing apparatus inside the cave.
“I brought with me these military gas masks with filters. We needed some kind of covering to put over our heads, too, or we’d get bat shit in our hair. We bought pillowcases at a local store. They were white, with big flowers. So the first time we went into the cave, it was a bunch of Kenyans and me wearing these military gas masks and these flowered pillowcases on our heads, and the Kenyans are just cracking up.”
They explored the cave and made a map of it. After this scouting trip, Gene Johnson persuaded the Army to sponsor a major expedition to Kitum Cave. Half a year after Peter Cardinal died, in the spring of 1988, Gene showed up in Nairobi with twenty shipping crates full of biohazard gear and scientific equipment. It included several military body bags, for holding human cadavers, and the members of his team had a serious discussion among themselves about how to handle their own remains if one of them died of Marburg. This time, Gene felt that he was closing in on the virus. He knew it would be hard to find even if it lived inside Kitum Cave, but he felt he was getting too close to fail in his quest. The monster lived in a cave, and he was going in there to find it.
The Kenyan government agreed to close Kitum Cave to tourists while the joint Kenya-U.S. expedition searched it for viruses. The head of the expedition was Dr. Peter Tukei of Kenya Medical Research Institute. Gene Johnson conceived the idea and gathered the equipment and found the money to pay for t. There were thirty-five team members, and most of them were Kenyans, including wildlife naturalists, scientists, doctors, and laborers. They brought along a large number of guinea pigs, traveling in boxes, and seventeen monkeys in cages, including baboons, Sykes’ monkeys, and African green monkeys. The monkeys and guinea pigs were sentinel animals, like canaries in a coal mine: they would be placed in cages inside and near Kitum Cave in the hope that some of them would break with Marburg virus. There are no instruments that can detect a virus. The best way to find a virus in the wild, at the present time, is to place a sentinel animal at the suspected location of the virus and hope the animal gets sick. Johnson figured that if any of his monkeys or guinea pigs crashed, he would be able to isolate the virus from the sick animals and would perhaps be able to discover how the animals had caught it.
1988 Spring
The Kitum Cave expedition set up headquarters in the Mount Elgon Lodge, a decayed resort dating from the nineteen twenties, when the English had ruled East Africa. The lodge had been built for sporting people and trout fishermen. It sat on a promontory overlooking the red-dirt road that wound up the mountain to Kitum Cave. It had once been surrounded by English gardens, which had partly collapsed into clay and African weeds. Indoors there were hardwood floors, waxed daily to perfect gleam. The lodge had turrets with round rooms and medieval doors, hand-carved from African olive wood, and the living room boasted an immense fireplace with a carved mantelpiece. The staff spoke very little English, but they were intent on maintaining English hospitality for the rare guest who might happen to show up. The Mount Elgon Lodge was a monument to the incomplete failure of the British Empire, which carried on automatically, like an uncontrollable tic, in the provincial backwaters of Africa long after it had died at the core. In the evenings, as the frost-tinged night came on, the staff built fires of Elgon olive logs in the fireplaces, and the food in the dining room was horrible, in the best English tradition. There was, however, a splendid bar. It was a quaint hideaway in a round chamber, stocked with shining rows of Tusker-beer bottles and French aperitifs and obscure African brandies. The men could sit at the bar and drink Tuskers or lean on the great mantel by the fire and tell stories after a hard day in the cave wearing a space suit. A sign on the wall by the concierge’s desk mentioned the delicate matter of money. It announced that since Mount Elgon Lodge’s suppliers had cut off all credit to the lodge, the lodge was unfortunately unable to extend any credit to its guests.
They moved the animals up the mountain in stages, to let them get used to the climate. When they got to
