"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone" - читать интересную книгу автора (Richard Preston)

them, but the effects pile up, one after the other, until they obliterate
the person beneath them. The case of Charles Monet emerges in a cold
geometry of clinical fact mixed with flashes of horror so brilliant and
disturbing that we draw back and blink, as if we are staring into a
discolored alien sun.
Monet came into the country in the summer of 1979, around the time
that human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, which causes AIDS, made a final
breakout from the rain forest of central Africa and began its long burn
through the human race. AIDS had already fallen like a shadow over the
population, although no one yet knew it existed. It had been spreading
quietly along the Kinshasa Highway, a transcontinental road that wanders
across Africa from east to west and passes along the shores of Lake
Victoria within sight of Mount Elgon. HIV is a highly lethal but not very
infective Biosafety Level 2 agent. It does not travel easily from person
to person, and it does not travel through the air. You don't need to wear
a biological suit while handling blood infected with HIV.
Monet worked hard in the pump house during the week, and on his
weekends and holidays he would visit forested areas near the sugar
factory. He would bring food with him, and he would scatter it around and
watch while birds and animals ate it. He could sit in perfect stillness
while he observed an animal. People who knew him recalled that he was
affectionate with wild monkeys, that he had a special way with them. They
said that he would sit holding a piece of food while a monkey approached
him, and the animal would eat from his hand.
On the evenings, he kept to himself in his bungalow. He had a
housekeeper, a woman named Johnnie, who cleaned up and prepared his meals.
He was teaching himself how to identify African birds. A colony of
weaverbirds lived in a tree near his house, and he spent time watching
them build and maintain their baglike nests. They say that one day near
Christmas he carried a sick bird into his house, where it died, perhaps in
his hands. The bird may have been a weaverbird--no one knows--and it may
have died of a Level 4 virus--no one knows. He also had a friendship with
a crow. It was a pied crow, a black-and-white bird that people in Africa
sometimes make into a pet. This crow was a friendly, intelligent bird
that liked to peek on the roof of Monet's bungalow and watch his comings
and goings. When the crow was hungry, it would land on the veranda and
walk indoors, and Monet would feed it scraps of food from his table.
He walked to work every morning through the cane fields, a journey of
two miles. That Christmas season, the workers had been burning the
fields, and so the fields were scorched and black. To the north across
the charred landscape, twenty-five miles away, he could see Mount Elgon.
The mountain displayed a constantly changing face of weather and shadow,
rain and sun, a spectacle of African light. At dawn, Mount Elgon appeared
as a slumped pile of gray ridges receding into haze, culminating in a
summit with two peaks, which are opposed lips of the eroded cone. As the
sun came up, the mountain turned silvery green, the color of the Mount
Elgon rain forest, and as the day progressed clouds appeared and hid the
mountain from view. Late in the afternoon, near sunset, the clouds
thickened and boiled up into an anvil thunderhead that flickered with
silent lightning. The bottom of the cloud was the color of charcoal, and