"Richard Preston - The Hot Zone2" - читать интересную книгу автора (Preston Richard)

than a hundred yards across--wider than the length of a football field.
They found a crevice and shined their lights down to the bottom. There
was something strange down there--a mass of gray and brownish material.
It was the mummified corpses of baby elephants. When elephants walk
through the cave at night, they navigate by their sense of touch, probing
the floor ahead of them with the tips of their trunks. The babies
sometimes fall into the crevice.
Monet and his friend continued deeper into the cave, descending a
slope, until they came to a pillar that seemed to support the roof. The
pillar was scored with hatch marks and grooves, the marks of elephant
tusks. If the elephants continued to dig away at the base of the pillar,
it might eventually collapse, bringing down the roof of Kitum Cave with


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it. At the back of the cave, they found another pillar. This one was
broken. Over it hung a velvety mass of bats, which had fouled the pillar
with black guano--a different kind of guano from the green slime near the
mouth of the cave. These bats were insect eaters, and the guano was an
ooze of digested insects. Did Monet put his hand in the ooze?
Monet's friend dropped out of sight for several years after that trip
to Mount Elgon. Then, unexpectedly, she surfaced in a bar in Mombasa,
where she was working as a prostitute. A Kenyan doctor who had
investigated the Monet case happened to be drinking a beer in the bar, and
he struck up an idle conversation with her and mentioned Monet's name. He
was stunned when she said, "I know about that. I come from western Kenya.
I was the woman with Charles Monet." He didn't believe her, but she told
him the story in enough detail that he became convinced she was telling
the truth. She vanished after that meeting in the bar, lost in the
warrens of Mombasa, and by now she has probably died of AIDS.
Charles Monet returned to his job at the pump house at the sugar
factory. He walked to work each day across the burned cane fields, no
doubt admiring the view of Mount Elgon, and when the mountain was buried
in clouds, perhaps he could still feel its pull, like the gravity of an
invisible planet. Meanwhile, something was making copies of itself inside
Monet. A life form had acquired Charles Monet as a host, and it was
replicating.


THE HEADACHE BEGINS, typically, on the seventh day after exposure to the
agent. On the seventh day after his New Year's visit to Kitum
Cave--January 8, 1980--Monet felt a throbbing pain behind his eyeballs.
He decided to stay home from work and went to bed in his bungalow. The
headache grew worse. His eyeballs ached, and then his temples began to
ache, the pain seeming to circle around inside his head. It would not go
away with aspirin, and then he got a severe backache. His housekeeper,
Johnnie, was still on her Christmas vacation, and he had recently hired a
temporary housekeeper. She tried to take care of him, but she really did