Congo Page 20
Kahega and his men moved swiftly, splashing kerosene over the tents and dead bodies. Elliot smelled the sharp odor.
Ross, crouched under a torn nylon supply tent, shouted, “Give me a minute!”
“Take all the time you want,” Munro said. He turned to Elliot, who was watching Amy outside the camp.
Amy was signing to herself: People bad. No believe people bad things come.
“She seems very calm about it,” Munro said.
“Not really,” Elliot said. “I think she knows what took place here.”
“I ‘hope she’ll tell us,” Munro said. “Because all these men died in the same way. Their skulls were crushed.”
The flames from the consortium camp licked upward into the air, and the black smoke bellowed as the expedition moved onward through the jungle. Ross was silent, lost in thought. Elliot said, “What did you find?”
“Nothing good,” she said. “They had a perfectly adequate peripheral system, quite similar to our ADP—animal defense perimeter. Those cones I found are audio-sensing units, and when they pick up a signal, they emit an ultrahigh-frequency signal that is very painful to auditory systems. Doesn’t work for reptiles, but it’s damn effective on mammalian systems. Send-a wolf or a leopard running for the hills.”
“But it didn’t work here,” Elliot said.
“No,” Ross said. “And it didn’t bother Amy very much.” Elliot said, “What does it do to human auditory systems?”
“You felt it. It’s annoying, but that’s all.” She glanced at Elliot. “But there aren’t any human beings in this part of the Congo. Except us.”
Munro asked, “Can we make a better perimeter defense?”
“Damn right we can,” Ross said. “I’ll give you the next generation perimeter—it’ll stop anything except elephants and rhinos.” But she didn’t sound convinced.
Late in the afternoon, they came upon the remains of the first ERTS Congo camp. They nearly missed it, for during the intervening eight days the jungle vines and creepers had already begun to grow back over it, obliterating all traces. There was not much left—a few shreds of orange nylon, a dented aluminum cooking pan, the crushed tripod, and the broken video camera, its green circuit boards scattered across the ground. They found no bodies, and since the light was fading they pressed on.
Amy was distinctly agitated, She signed, No go.
Peter Elliot paid no attention.
Bad place old place no go.
“We go, Amy,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later they came to a break in the overhanging trees. Looking up, they saw the dark cone of Mukenko rising above the forest, and the faint crossed green beams of the lasers glinting in the humid air. And directly beneath the beams were the moss-covered stone blocks, half concealed in jungle foliage, of the Lost City of Zinj.
Elliot turned to look at Amy.
Amy was gone.
4. WEIRD
HE COULD NOT BELIEVE IT.
At first he thought she was just punishing him, running off to make him sorry for shooting the dart at her on the river. He explained to Munro and Ross that she was capable of such things, and they spent the next half hour wandering through the jungle, calling her name. But there was no response, just the eternal silence of the rain forest. The half hour became an hour, then almost two hours.
Elliot was panic-stricken.
When she still did not emerge from the foliage, another possibility had to be considered. “Maybe she ran off with the last group of gorillas,” Munro said.
“Impossible,” Elliot said.
“She’s seven, she’s near maturity.” Munro shrugged.
“She is a gorilla.” -
“Impossible,” Elliot insisted.
But he knew what Munro was saying. Inevitably, people who raised apes found at a certain point they could no longer keep them. With maturity the animals became too large, too powerful, too much their own species to be controllable. It was no longer possible to put them in diapers and pretend they were cute humanlike creatures. Their genes coded inevitable differences that ultimately became impossible to overlook.
“Gorilla troops aren’t closed,” Munro reminded him. “They accept strangers, particularly female strangers.”
“She wouldn’t do that,” Elliot insisted. “She couldn’t.”
Amy had been raised from infancy among human beings. She was much more familiar with the Westernized world of freeways and drive-ins than she was with the jungle. If Elliot drove his car past her favorite drive-in, she was quick to tap his shoulder and point out his error. What did she know of the jungle? It was as alien to her as it was to Elliot himself. And not only that— “We’d better make camp,” Ross said, glancing at her watch. “She’ll come back—if she wants to. After all,” she said, “we didn’t leave her. She left us.”
They had brought a bottle of Dom Perignon champagne but nobody was in a mood to celebrate. Elliot was remorseful over the loss of Amy; the others were horrified by what they had seen of the earlier camp; with night rapidly falling, there was much to do to setup the ERTS system known as WEIRD (Wilderness Environmental Intruder Response Defenses).
The exotic WEIRD technology recognized the fact that perimeter defenses were traditional throughout the history of Congo exploration. More than a century before, Stanley observed that “no camp is to be considered complete until it is fenced around by bush or trees.” In the years since there was little reason to alter the essential nature of that instruction.
But defensive technology had changed, and the WEIRD system incorporated all the latest innovations.
Kahega and his men inflated the silvered Mylar tents, arranging them close together. Ross directed the placement of the tubular infrared night lights on telescoping tripods. These were positioned shining outward around the camp.
Next the perimeter fence was installed. This was a lightweight metalloid mesh, more like cloth than wire. Attached to stakes, it completely enclosed the campsite, and when hooked to the transformer carried 10,000 volts of electrical current. To reduce drain on the fuel cells, the current was pulsed at four cycles a second, creating a throbbing, intermittent hum.
Dinner on the night of June 20 was rice with rehydrated Creole shrimp sauce. The shrimps did not rehydrate well, remaining little cardboard-tasting chunks in the mix, but nobody complained about this failure of twentieth-century technology as they glanced around them at the deepening jungle darkness.
Munro positioned the sentries. They would stand -four-hour watches; Munro announced that he, Kahega, and Elliot would take the first watch.
With night goggles in place, the sentries looked like mysterious grasshoppers peering out at the jungle. The night goggles intensified ambient light and overlaid this on the preexisting imagery, rimming it in ghostly green. Elliot found the goggles heavy, and the electronic view through them difficult to adjust to. He pulled them off after several minutes, and was astonished to see that the jungle was inky black around him. He put them back on hastily.
The night passed quietly, without incident.
DAY 9: ZINJ
June 21, 1979
1. Tiger Tail
THEIR ENTRANCE INTO THE LOST CITY OF ZINJ ON the morning of June 21 was accomplished with none of the mystery and romance of nineteenth-century accounts of similar journeys. These twentieth-century explorers sweated and grunted under a burdensome load of technical equipment— optical range finders, data-lock compasses, RF directionals with attached transmitters, and microwave transponders—all deemed essential to the modem high-speed evaluation of a ruined archaeological site.
They were only interested in diamonds. Schliemann had been only interested in gold when he excavated Troy, and he had devoted three years to it. Ross expected to find her diamonds in three days.
According to the ERTS computer simulation the best way to do this was to draw up a ground plan of the city. With a plan in hand, it would be relatively simple to deduce mine locations from the arrangement of urb
an structures.
They expected a usable plan of the city within six hours. Using RF transponders, they had only to stand in each of the four corners of a building, pressing the radio beeper at each corner. Back in camp, two widely spaced receivers recorded their signals so that their computer could plot them in two dimensions. But the ruins were extensive, covering more than three square kilometers. A radio survey would separate them widely in dense foliage—and, considering what had happened to the previous expedition, this seemed unwise.
Their alternative was what ERTS called the non-systematic Survey, or “the tiger-tail approach.” (It was a joke at ERTS that one way to find a tiger was to keep walking until you stepped on its tail.) They moved through the ruined buildings, avoiding slithering snakes and giant spiders that scurried into dark recesses. The spiders were the size of a man’s hand, and to Ross’s astonishment made a loud clicking noise.
They noticed that the stonework was of excellent quality, although the limestone in many places was pitted and crumbling. And everywhere they saw the half-moon curve of doors and windows, which seemed to be a cultural design motif.
But aside from that curved shape, they found almost nothing distinctive about the rooms they passed through. In general, the rooms were rectangular and roughly the same size; the walls were bare, lacking decoration. After so many intervening centuries they found no artifacts at all—although Elliot finally came upon a pair of disc-shaped stone paddles, which they presumed had been used to grind spices or grain.
The bland, characterless quality of the city grew more disturbing as they continued; it was also inconvenient, since they had no way to refer to one place or another; they began assigning arbitrary names to different buildings. When Karen Ross found a series of cubby holes carved into the wall of one room, she announced that this must be a post office, and from then on it was referred to as “the post office.”
They came upon a row of small rooms with postholes for wooden bars. Munro thought these were cells of a jail, but the cells were extremely small. Ross said that perhaps the people were small, or perhaps the cells were intentionally small for punishment. Elliot thought perhaps they were cages for a zoo. But in that case, why were all the cages of the same size? And Munro pointed out there was no provision for viewing the animals; he repeated his conviction that it was a jail, and the rooms became known as “the jail.”
Near to. the jail they found an open court they called “the gymnasium.” It was apparently an athletic field or training ground. There were four tall stone stakes with a crumbling stone ring at the top; evidently these had been used for some kind of game like tetherball. In a corner of the court stood a horizontal overhead bar, like a jungle gym, no more than five feet off the ground. The low bar led Elliot to conclude that this was a playground for children. Ross repeated her belief that the people were small. Munro wondered if the gymnasium was a training area for soldiers.
As they continued their search, they were all aware that their reactions simply mirrored their preoccupations. The city was so neutral, so uninformative, that it became a kind of Rorschach for them. What they needed was objective information about the people who had built the city, and their life.
It was there all along, although they were slow to realize it. In many rooms, one wall or another was overgrown with black-green mold. Munro noticed that this mold did not grow in relation to light from a window, or air currents, or any other factor they could identify. In some rooms, the mold grew thickly halfway down a wall, only to stop in a sharp horizontal line, as if cut by a knife.
“Damn strange,” Munro said, peering at the mold, rubbing his finger against it. His finger came away with traces of blue paint.
That was how they discovered the elaborate bas-reliefs, once painted, that appeared throughout the city. However, the overgrowth of mold on the irregular carved surface and the pitting of the limestone made any interpretation of the images impossible.
At lunch, Munro mentioned that it was too bad they hadn’t brought along a group of art historians to recover the bas-relief images. “With all their lights and machines, they could see what’s there in no time,” he said.
The most recent examination techniques for artwork, as devised by Degusto and others, employed infrared light and image intensification, and the Congo expedition had the necessary equipment to contrive such a method on the spot. At least it was worth a try. After lunch they returned to the ruins, lugging in the video camera, one of the infrared night lights, and the tiny computer display screen.
After an hour of fiddling they had worked out a system. By shining infrared light on the walls and recording the image with the video camera—and then feeding that image via Satellite through the digitizing computer programs in Houston, and returning it back to their portable display unit—they were able to reconstitute the pictures on the walls.
Seeing the bas-reliefs in this way reminded Peter Elliot of the night goggles. If you looked directly at the walls, you saw nothing but dark moss and lichen and pitted stone. But if you looked at the little computer screen, you saw the original painted scenes, vibrant and lifelike. It was, he remembered, “very peculiar. There we were in the middle of the jungle, but we could only examine our environment indirectly, with the machines. We used goggles to see at night, arid video to see during the day. We were using machines to see what we could not see otherwise, and we were totally dependent on them.”
He also found it odd that the information recorded by the video camera had to travel more than twenty thousand miles before returning to the display screen, only a few feet away. It was, he said later, the “world’s longest spinal cord,” and it produced an odd effect. Even at the speed of light, the transmission required a tenth of a second, and since there was a short processing time in the Houston computer, the images did not appear on the screen instantaneously, but arrived about half a second late. The delay was just barely noticeable. The scenes they saw provided them with their first insight into the city and its inhabitants.
The people of Zinj were relatively tall blacks, with round beads and muscular bodies; in appearance they resembled the Bantu-speaking people who had first entered the Congo from the highland savannahs to the north, two thousand years ago. They were depicted here as lively and energetic: despite the climate, they favored elaborately decorated, colorful long robes; their attitudes and gestures were expansive; in all ways they contrasted sharply with the bland and crumbling structures, now all that remained of their civilization.
The first decoded frescoes showed marketplace scenes: sellers squatted on the ground beside beautiful woven baskets containing round objects, while buyers stood and bargained with them. At first they thought the round objects were fruit, but Ross decided they were stones.
“Those are uncut diamonds in a surrounding matrix,” she said, staring at the screen. “They’re selling diamonds.”
The frescoes led them to consider what had happened to the inhabitants of the city of Zinj, for the city was clearly abandoned, not destroyed—there was no sign of war or invaders, no evidence of any cataclysm or natural disaster.
Ross, voicing her deepest fears, suspected the diamond mines had given out, turning this city into a ghost town like so many other mining settlements in history. Elliot thought that a plague or disease had overcome the inhabitants. Munro said he thought the gorillas were responsible.
“Don’t laugh,” he said. “This is a volcanic area. Eruptions, earthquakes, drought, fires on the savannah—the animals go berserk, and don’t behave in the ordinary way at all.”
“Nature on the rampage?” Elliot asked, shaking his head. “There are volcanic eruptions here every few years, and we know this city existed for centuries. It can’t be that.”
“Maybe there was a palace revolution, a coup.”
“What would that matter to gorillas?” Elliot laughed.
“It happens,” Munro said. “In Africa, the animals always get strange when there’s a war on, you know.” He then t
old them stories of baboons attacking farmhouses in South Africa and buses in Ethiopia.
Elliot was unimpressed. These ideas of nature mirroring the affairs of man were very old—at least as old as Aesop, and about as scientific. “The natural world is indifferent to man,” he said.
“Oh, no question,” Munro said, “but there isn’t much natural world left.”
Elliot was reluctant to agree with Munro, but. in fact a well-known academic thesis argued just that. In 1955, the French anthropologist Maurice Cavalle published a controversial paper entitled “The Death of Nature.” In it he said:
One million years ago the earth was characterized by a pervasive wilderness which we may call “nature.” In the midst of this wild nature stood small enclaves of human habitation. Whether caves with artificial fire to keep men warm, or later cities with dwellings and artificial fields of cultivation, these enclaves were distinctly unnatural. In the succeeding millennia, the area of untouched nature surrounding artificial human enclaves progressively declined, although for centuries the trend remained invisible.
Even 300 years ago in France or England, the great cities of man were isolated by hectares of wilderness in which untamed beasts roamed, as they had for thousands of years before. And yet the expansion of man continued inexorably.
One hundred years ago, in the last days of the great European explorers, nature had so radically diminished that it was a novelty: it is for this reason that African explorations captured the imagination of nineteenth-century man. lb enter a truly natural world was exotic, beyond the experience of most mankind, who lived from birth to death in entirely man-made circumstances.
In the twentieth century the balance has shifted so far that for all practical purposes one may say that nature has disappeared. Wild plants are preserved in hothouses, wild animals in zoos and game parks: artificial settings created by man as a souvenir of the once-prevalent natural world. But an animal in a zoo or a game park does not live its natural life, any more than a man in a city lives a natural life.