Smallpox is the only virus ever to succumb to the efforts of mankind. The sole extant strain remains frozen and archived among tens of thousands of high-risk biological agents in the security containment vault of BDC Building Thirteen.
Edward Jenner deservedly achieved the eminence to which all medical scientists aspire. His contribution to the human species was significant, and in 1823 Jenner died arguably the first global hero.
I, certainly, would not die the last.
I spent our brief Paris layover out on the tarmac at de Gaulle, wrapped in a borrowed orange parka, overseeing the transfer of a hundred pounds of equipment and supplies onto a Swissair jet. The flight to Gabon passed uneventfully. I drifted in and out of sleep while Peter busied himself with his tablet, most likely tapping out some obscure virological missive that would never see publication. We changed planes again and split four matches of computer chess during the final leg of the journey, from Libreville, Gabon, to the sprawling RECI reserve east of Bomassa.
The head of the Rainforest Ecology Conservation International camp was a rangy ex-Californian named Todd. He sported a floppy bush hat and greeted us at the plane with a surfer’s smile and a strange look at Peter. “Merry Christmas,” he said.
I shook his hand, but Peter was busy watching our Cameroonian pilot, a hajji, kneeling beside the T-tail of the eighteen-seat turboprop, praying his salat. The orange light of the dawning sun warmed the pilot’s face and felled a shadow of reverence on the runway behind him.
We declined their offer of breakfast, and four other bright-eyed conservationists helped with the gear transfer into a waiting Pinzgauer Turbo. They argued with one another over the directions, eventually producing a hand drawn map of cross-outs and jagged arrows.
“Good time to be here,” said Todd, his unlaced boot resting on the towing loop of the all-terrain Pinzgauer. “Neat little window on the rainy season right around Christmas time, these next two weeks. Roads should hold. This is Pygmy territory. You two okay with that?”
Peter, tying a white cotton headwrap around his shining white hair, nodded.
“You’ll run into them if you’re lucky,” said Todd. “This is their backyard. And they take francs.”
Peter said, “I like your hat.”
Todd’s eyebrows rose in response. He pulled the hat off his head and inspected it. “Imitation snakeskin,” he said, touching the band, as though accused of something. Todd looked a decade older without the hat, strings of brown hair drawn across his sweat-soaked pate. He seemed to consider making a gift of the hat, then instead replaced it firmly on his head and squinted into the risen sun. “We got some teams camping out there, entomologists, botanists. Should I be calling them in?”
“No need,” I said. I pulled down an Emory University ball cap snugly over my brow and climbed into the green Pinzgauer. “We should be back to you in a day or so.”
Peter drove us out. The road deteriorated immediately from hard dirt and sandy shoulders to soft gray dirt and no shoulders to encroaching jungle walls and emerald vines sweeping like pennants over the windshield. A light, wavy mist became a driving rain that pattered the massive, thickly veined tree leaves, sloughing rivulets of water into the softening road, and our speed dropped to five kilometers per hour. The road faded and reappeared but the map read true.
I marveled. The vegetation spilled over us as though from a perpetual green fountain, reducing the Pinzgauer to little more than a sturdy beetle scuttling over the ground. We drove like that for hours, and my thoughts returned, as always, to work back home, to PeaMar4.
Peter stopped for the first Pygmy we saw. He was an elderly man with rich brown skin and a short, dusty beard, wearing only a battered navy blue suit jacket and a sheath that covered his groin, holding a whittled staff by the side of the road. Peter got out and approached and exchanged les salutations with the diminutive man, whereupon the rest of the tribe emerged from the vegetation behind him, as one. I had remained a few yards back, near the car.
The old man, standing not much taller than one meter, next to Peter who stood just under two, cast a dark eye upon Peter’s gloved hands.
“Médecins Sans Frontières?” he said.
Peter shook his head. He spelled out “C-D-C.”
Some among the tribe nodded. They were used to intrusions by doctors and scientists. As a race Pygmies possessed extraordinary natural immunities, including a seeming resistance to certain clades, or distinguishing strains, of the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV. Although they had lived for millennia in the remote rain forest region that was the epicenter of the virus that caused AIDS, in the three active decades of the disease no infections had yet been reported among their tribes. This revelation in the early part of this century had led to a resurgence of interest from immunologists hoping to penetrate the mystery of the coevolution of virus and man.
The old gentleman reassured Peter that we were nearing “the settlement,” as he called it. Then at once he grasped Peter’s oversized hands and regarded them through their latex shields. “As young as your hands,” he said in French, “or as wise as your hair?”
The question seemed to amuse Peter. He glanced back, then looked out at the tribe.
“Le chapeau,” he said. One of the tribesmen was wearing a bush hat similar to Todd’s, fixed atop a traditional African toque for balance and fit. The snakeskin band appeared authentic.
Peter relieved him of the hat with four hundred of the five thousand francs he had withdrawn on account from the CDC currency office — somehow he had known where to locate the keys — and presented the old man with an appropriate tribute of four blue pouches of Drum rolling tobacco, procured at de Gaulle airport for just such an occasion.
Peter fitted the hat onto his wrapped head as the old man raised his tobacco pouches in appreciation. His tribesmen followed, all raising their hands and whatever tools they held in them. It was something to see, this race of immunologically advanced people saluting Peter Maryk, who was in fact immunologically nearly a race of people unto himself.
I remained behind. In the jungle our roles were reversed, and for one of the few times in my life, I smiled the empty smile of the outsider.
The pitted, sunken road was a courtesy the jungle soon withdrew.
The twists and turns of the RECI map led us out beyond the eastern border of the conservation lands, the Pinzgauer surfing a collapsing tsunami of mighty vegetation. The land rose and fell and we rose and fell with it. Roadside bursts of beauty — waterfalls, lagoons — became routine, a whispering palette of emerald and black and olive. In time the rains returned to crash against the steel grille and overmatch the windshield wipers of the Pinzgauer, a fresh sheen of mud slicking the jagged road. The path before us flickered but never quite went out.
The rain pecked at the immense leaves, giving them fitting life as we rolled past. The jungle now seemed antagonistic; my earlier wonder was eclipsed by a mix of respect and fear. In no other place on earth does man feel more like the intruder that he is. Tamed or chased out of the megacities of the world, here resided the fugitive Nature, the artist in exile, stripped of her canvases and finer oils, now hurling paint.