Michael Crichton - Congo

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CONGO

MICHAEL CRICHTON

For Bob Gottlieb

Introduction

Only prejudice, and a trick of the Mercator projection, prevents us

from recognizing the enormity of the African continent. Covering nearly

twelve million square miles, Africa is almost as large as North America and

Europe combined. It is nearly twice the size of South America. As we

mistake its dimensions, we also mistake its essential nature: the Dark

Continent is mostly hot desert and open grassy plains.

In fact, Africa is called the Dark Continent for one reason only: the vast

equatorial rain forests of its central region. This is the drainage basin

of the Congo River, and one-tenth of the continent is given over to it—a

million and a half square miles of silent, damp, dark forest, a single

uniform geographical feature nearly half the size of the continental United

States. This primeval forest has stood, unchanged and unchallenged, for

more than sixty million years.

Even today, only half a million people inhabit the Congo Basin, and they

are mostly clustered in villages along the banks of the slow muddy rivers

that flow through the jungle. The great expanse of the forest remains

inviolate, and to this day thousands of square miles are still unexplored.

This is true particularly of the northeastern corner of the Congo Basin,

where the rain forest meets the Virunga volcanoes, at the edge of the Great

Rift Valley. Lacking established trade routes or compelling features of

interest, Virunga was never seen by Western eyes until less than a hundred

years ago.

The race to make “the most important discovery of the 1980s” in the Congo

took place during six weeks of 1979. This book recounts the thirteen days

of the last American expedition to the Congo, in June, 1979—barely a

hundred years after Henry Morton Stanley first explored the Congo in

1874—77. A comparison of the two expeditions reveals much about the

changing—and unchanging—nature of African exploration in the intervening

century.

Stanley is usually remembered as the newsman who found Livingstone in 1871,

but his real importance lay in later exploits. Moorehead calls him “a new

kind of man in Africa. . . a businessman-explorer.. . . Stanley was not in

Africa to reform the people nor to build an empire, and he was not impelled

by any real interest in such matters as anthropology, botany or geology. To

put it bluntly, he was out to make a name for himself.”

When Stanley set out again from Zanzibar in 1874, he was again handsomely

financed by newspapers. And when he emerged from the jungle at the

Atlantic Ocean 999 days later, having suffered incredible hardships and the

loss of more than two-thirds of his original party, both he and his

newspapers had one of the great stories of the century: Stanley had

traveled the entire length of the Congo River.

But two years later, Stanley was back in Africa under very different

circumstances. He traveled under an assumed name; he made diversionary

excursions to throw spies off his trail; the few people who knew he was in

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Africa could only guess that he had in mind “some grand commercial scheme.”

In fact, Stanley was financed by Leopold II of Belgium, who intended to

acquire personally a large piece of Africa. “It is not a question of

Belgian colonies,” Leopold wrote Stanley. “It is a question of creating a

new State, as big as possible. . . . The King, as a private person, wishes

to possess properties in Africa. Belgium wants neither a colony nor

territories. Mr. Stanley must therefore buy lands or get them conceded to

him

This incredible plan was carried out. By 1885, one American said that

Leopold “possesses the Congo just as Rockefeller possesses Standard Oil.”

The comparison was apt in more ways than one, for African exploration had

become dominated by business.

It has remained so to this day. Stanley would have approved the 1979

American expedition, which was conducted in secrecy, with an emphasis on

speed. But the differences would have astonished him. When Stanley passed

near Virunga in 1875, it had taken him almost a year to get there; the

Americans got their expedition on-site in just over a week. And Stanley,

who traveled with a small army of four hundred, would have been amazed at

an expedition of only twelve—and one of them an ape. The territories

through which the Americans moved a century later were autonomous political

states; the Congo was now Zaire, and the Congo River the Zaire River. In

fact, by 1979 the word “Congo” technically referred only to the drainage

basin of the Zaire River, although Congo was still used in geological

circles as a matter of familiarity, and for its romantic connotations.

Despite these differences, the expeditions had remarkably similar outcomes.

Like Stanley, the Americans lost two-thirds of their party, and emerged

from the jungle as desperately as Stanley’s men a century before. And like

Stanley, they returned with incredible tales of cannibals and pygmies,

ruined jungle civilizations, and fabulous lost treasures.

I would like to thank R. B. Travis, of Earth Resources Technology Services

in Houston, for permission to use videotaped debriefings; Dr. Karen Ross,

of ERTS, for further background on the expedition; Dr. Peter Elliot, of the

Department of Zoology, University of California at Berkeley, and the

Project Amy staff, including Amy herself; Dr. William Wens, of Kasai Mining

& Manufacturing, Zaire; Dr. Smith Jefferson, of the Department of Medical

Pathology, University of Nairobi, Kenya; and Captain Charles Munro, of

Tangier, Morocco.

I am further indebted to Mark Warwick, of Nairobi, for his initial interest

this project; Alan Binb, of Nairobi, for graciously offering to take me

Into the Virunga region of Zaire; Joyce Small for arranging my transport,

usually at short notice, to obscure parts of the world; and finally my

special thanks to my assistant, Judith Lovejoy, whose untiring efforts

through very difficult times were crucial to the completion of this book.

M.C.

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Prologue:

The Place of Bones

DAWN CAME TO THE CONGO RAIN FOREST.

The pale sun burned away the morning chill and the clinging damp mist,

revealing a gigantic silent world. Enormous trees with trunks forty feet in

diameter rose two hundred feet overhead, where they spread their dense

leafy canopy, blotting out the sky and perpetually dripping water to the

ground below. Curtains of gray moss, and creepers and lianas, hung down in

a tangle from the trees; parasitic orchids sprouted from the trunks. At

ground level, huge ferns, gleaming with moisture, grew higher than a man’s

chest and held the low ground fog. Here and there was a spot of color: the

red acanthema blossoms, which were deadly poison, and the blue dicindra

vine, which only opened in early morning. But the basic impression was of a

vast, oversized, gray-green world— an alien place, inhospitable to man.

Jan Kruger put aside his rifle and stretched his stiff muscles. Dawn came

quickly at the equator; soon it was quite light, although the mist

remained. He glanced at the expedition campsite he had been guarding: eight

bright orange nylon tents, a blue mess tent, a supply tarp lashed over

boxed equipment in a vain attempt to keep them dry. He saw the other guard,

Misulu, sitting on a rock; Misulu waved sleepily. Nearby was the

transmitting equipment: a silver dish antenna, the black transmitter box,

the snaking coaxial cables running to the portable video camera mounted on

the collapsible tripod. The Americans used this equipment to transmit daily

reports by satellite to their home office in Houston.

Kruger was the bwana mukubwa, hired to take the expedition into the Congo.

He had led expeditions before: oil companies, map-survey parties,

timber-mining teams, and geological parties like this one. Companies

sending teams into the field wanted someone who knew local customs and

local dialects well enough to handle the porters and arrange the travel.

Kruger was well suited for this job; he spoke Kis-wahili as well as Bantu

and a little Bagindi, and he had been to the Congo many times, although

never to Virunga.

Kruger could not imagine why American geologists would want to go to the

Virunga region of Zaire, in the northeast corner of the Congo rain forest.

Zaire was the richest country in black Africa, in minerals—the world’s

largest producer of cobalt and industrial diamonds, the seventh largest

producer of copper. In addition there were major deposits of gold, tin,

zinc, tungsten and uranium. But most of the minerals were found in Shaba

and Kasai, not in Virunga.

Kruger knew better than to ask why the Americans wanted to go to Virunga,

and in any case he had his answer soon enough. Once the expedition passed

Lake Kivu and entered the rain forest, the geologists began scouring rivers

and streambeds. Searching placer deposits meant that they were looking for

gold, or diamonds. It turned out to be diamonds.

But not just any diamonds. The geologists were after what they called Type

IIb diamonds. Each new sample was immediately submitted to an electrical

test. The resulting conversations were beyond Kruger—talk of dielectric

gaps, lattice ions, resistively. But he gathered that it was the electrical

properties of the diamonds that mattered. Certainly the samples were

useless as gemstones. Kruger had examined several, and they were all blue

from impurities.

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For ten days, the expedition had been tracing back placer deposits. This

was standard procedure: if you found gold or diamonds in streambeds, you

moved upstream toward the presumed erosive source of the minerals. The

expedition had moved to higher ground along the western slopes of the

Vir-gunga volcanic chain. It was all going routinely until one day around

noon when the porters flatly refused to proceed further.

This part of Virunga, they said, was called kanyamagufa,

which meant “the place of bones.” The porters insisted that any men foolish

enough to go further would have their bones broken, particularly their

skulls. They kept touching their cheekbones, and repeating that their

skulls would be crushed.

The porters were Bantu-speaking Arawanis from the nearest large town,

Kisangani. Like most town-dwelling natives, they had all sorts of

superstitions about the Congo jungle. Kruger called for the headman.

“What tribes are here?” Kruger asked, pointing to the jungle ahead.

“No tribes,” the headman said.

“No tribes at all? Not even Bambuti?” he asked, referring to the nearest

group of pygmies.

“No men come here,” the headman said. “This is kan-yamagufa.”

“Then what crushes the skulls?”

“Dawa,” the headman said ominously, using the Bantu term for magical

forces. “Strong dawa here. Men stay away.”

Kruger sighed. Like many white men, he was thoroughly sick of hearing about

dawa. Dawa was everywhere, in plants and rocks and storms and enemies of

all kinds. But the belief in dawa was prevalent throughout much of Africa

and strongly held in the Congo.

Kruger had been obliged to waste the rest of the day in tedious

negotiation. In the end, he doubled their wages and promised them firearms

when they returned to Kisangani, and they agreed to continue on. Kruger

considered the incident an irritating native ploy. Porters could generally

be counted on to invoke some local superstition to increase their wages,

once an expedition was deep enough into the field to be dependent on them.

He had budgeted for this eventuality and, having agreed to their demands,

he thought no more about it.

Even when they came upon several areas littered with shattered fragments of

bone—which the porters found frightening—Kruger was not concerned. Upon

examination, he found the bones were not human but rather the small

delicate bones of colobus monkeys, the beautiful shaggy black-and-

white creatures that lived in the trees overhead. It was true that there

were a lot of bones, and Kruger had no idea why they should be shattered,

but he had been in Africa a long time, and he had seen many inexplicable

things.

Nor was he any more impressed with the overgrown fragments of stone that

suggested a city had once stood in this area. Kruger had come upon

unexplored ruins before, too. In Zimbabwe, in Broken Hill, in Maniliwi,

there were the remains of cities and temples that no twentieth-century

scientist had ever seen and studied.

He camped the first night near the ruins.

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The porters were panic-stricken, insisting that the evil forces would

attack them during the night. Their fear was caught by the American

geologists; to pacify them, Kruger had posted two guards that night,

himself and the most trustworthy porter, Misulu. Kruger thought it was all

a lot of rot, but it had seemed the politic thing to do.

And just as he expected, the night had passed quietly. Around midnight

there had been some movement in the bush, and some low wheezing sounds,

which he took to be a leopard. Big cats often had respiratory trouble,

particularly in the jungle. Otherwise it was quiet, and now it was dawn:

the night was over.

A soft beeping sound drew his attention. Misulu heard it too, and glanced

questioningly at Kruger. On the transmitting equipment, a red light

blinked. Kruger got up and crossed the campsite to the equipment. He knew

how to operate it; the Americans had insisted that he learn, as an

“emergency procedure.” He crouched over the black transmitter box with its

rectangular green LED.

He pressed buttons, and the screen printed TX HX, meaning a transmission

from Houston. He pressed the response code, and the screen printed CAM LO

K. That meant that Houston was asking for video camera transmission. He

glanced over at the camera on its tripod and saw that the red light on the

case had blinked on. He pressed the carrier button and the screen printed

SATLOK, which meant that a satellite transmission was being Locked in.

There would now be a six-minute delay, the time required to lock the

satellite-bounced signal.

He’d better go wake Driscoll, the head geologist, he thought. Driscoll

would need a few minutes before the transmission came through. Kruger found

it amusing the way the Americans always put on a fresh shirt and combed

their hair before stepping in front of the camera. Just like television

reporters.

Overhead, the colobus monkeys shrieked and screamed in the trees, shaking

the branches. Kruger glanced upward, wondering what had set them going. But

it was normal for colobus monkeys to fight in the morning.

Something struck him lightly in the chest. At first he thought it was an

insect but, glancing down at his khaki shirt, he saw a spot of red, and a

fleshy bit of red fruit rolled down his shirt to the muddy ground. The

damned monkeys were throwing berries. He bent over to pick it up. And then

he realized that it was not a piece of fruit at all. It was a human

eyeball, crushed and slippery in his fingers, pinkish white with a shred of

white optic nerve still attached at the back.

He swung his gun around and looked over to where Misulu was sitting on the

rock. Misulu was not there.

Kruger moved across the campsite. Overhead, the colobus monkeys fell

silent. He heard his boots squish in the mud as he moved past the tents of

sleeping men. And then he heard the wheezing sound again. It was an odd,

soft sound, carried on the swirling morning mist. Kruger wondered if he had

been mistaken, if it was really a leopard.

And he saw Misulu. Misulu lay on his back, in a kind of halo of blood. His

skull had been crushed from the sides, the facial bones shattered, the face

narrowed and elongated, the mouth open in an obscene yawn, the one

remaining eye wide and bulging. The other eye had exploded outward with the

force of the impact.

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Michael Crichton - Congo

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