Congo

Congo Page 11

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 urban 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 told 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.

Today we are surrounded by man and his creations. Man is inescapable, everywhere on the globe, and nature is a fantasy, a dream of the past, long gone.

Ross called Elliot away from his dinner. "It's for you," she said, pointing to the computer next to the antenna. "That friend of yours again."

Munro grinned, "Even in the jungle, the phone never stops ringing."

Elliot went over to look at the screen: COMPUTR LNGWAGE ANALYSS NG REQUIR MOR INPUT KN PROVIDE?

WHT INPUT? Elliot typed back.

NOR AURL INPUT-TRNSMIT RECORDNGS.

Elliot typed back, Yes lf Occurs. YES IF OCRS.

RCORD FREQNCY 22 - 50,000 CYCLS - CRITICL

Elliot typed back, Understood. UNDRSTOD.

There was a pause, then the screen printed:HOWS AMY?

Elliot hesitated. FINE.

STAF SNOS LOV came the reply, and the transmission was momentarily interrupted.

HOLD TRSNMSN.

There was a long pause.

INCREDIBL NWZ, Seamans printed. HAV FOUND MRS SWENSN

2.Swensn NWZ

FOR A MOMENT ELLIOT DID NOT RECOGNIZE THE name. Swensn? Who was Swensn? A transmission error? And then he realized: Mrs. Swenson! Amy's discoverer, the woman who had brought her from Africa and had donated her to the Minneapolis zoo. The woman who had been in Borneo all these weeks. IF WE HAD ONLY KNON AMY MOTHR NOT KILD BY NATIVS.

Elliot waited impatiently for the next message from Seamans.

Elliot stared at the message. He had always been told that Amy's mother had been killed by natives in a village called Bagimindi. The mother had been killed for food, and Amy was orphaned. . .

WHT MEANS?

MOTHR ALREDY DED NOT EATN.

The natives hadn't killed Amy's moth& She was already dead?

XPLN.

SWENSN HAS PICTR CAN TRAMSMT?

Hastily, Elliot typed, his fingers fumbling at the keyboard.

TRANSMT.

There was a pause that seemed interminable, and then the video screen received the transmission, scanning it from top to bottom. Long before the picture filled the screen, Elliot realized what it showed.

A crude snapshot of a gorilla corpse with a crushed skull. The animal lay on its back in a packed-earth clearing, presumably in a native village.

In that moment Elliot felt as if the puzzle that preoccupied him, that had caused so much anguish for so many months, was explained. If only they had been able to reach her before...

The glowing electronic image faded to black.

Elliot was confronted by a rush of sudden questions. Crushed skulls occurred in the remote - and supposedly uninhabited - region of the Congo, kanyamagufa, the place of bones. But Bagimindi was a trading village on the Lubula River, more than a hundred miles away. How had Amy and her dead mother reached Bagimindi?

Ross said, "Got a problem?"

"I don't understand the sequence. I need to ask - "

"Before you do," she said, "review the transmission. It's all in memory." She pressed a button marked REPEAT.

The earlier transmitted conversation was repeated on the screen. As Elliot watched Seaman's answers, one line struck him: MOTHR ALREDY DED NOT EATN.

Why wasn't the mother eaten? Gorilla meat was an acceptable - indeed a prized - food in this part of the Congo basin. He typed in a question:

WHY MOTHR NOT EATN.

MOTHR / INFNT FWND BY NATIV ARMY PATRL DOWN FRM SUDAN CARRIED CRPSE / INFNT 5 DAYS TO BAG-MINDI VILLAG FOR SALE TOURISTS. SWENSN THERE.

Five days! Quickly, Elliot typed the important question:

WHER FWNO?

The answer came back: UNKNWN AREA CONGO.

SPECFY.

NO DETALS. A short pause, then: THERS MOR PICTRS.

SND, he typed back.

The screen went blank, and then filled once more, from top to bottom. Now he saw a closer view of the female gor?illa's crushed skull. And alongside the huge skull, a small black creature lying on the ground, hands and feet clenched, mouth open in a frozen scream.

Amy.

Ross repeated the transmission several times, finishing on the image of Amy as an infant - small, black, screaming.

"No wonder she's been having nightmares," Ross said. "She probably saw her mother killed."

Elliot said, "Well, at least we can be sure it wasn't gorillas. They don't kill each other."

"Right now," Ross said, "we can't be sure of anything at all.,,

The night of June 21 was so quiet that by ten o'clock they switched off the infrared night lights to save power. Almost at once they became aware of movement in the foliage outside the compound. Munro and Kahega swung their guns around. The rustling increased, and they heard an odd sighing sound, a sort of wheeze.

Elliot heard it too, and felt a chill: it was the same wheezing that had been recorded on the tapes from the first Congo expedition. He turned on the tape recorder, and swung the microphone around. They were all tense, alert, waiting.

But for the next hour nothing further happened. The foliage moved all around them, but they saw nothing. Then shortly before midnight the electrified perimeter fence erupted in sparks. Munro swung his gun around and fired; Ross hit the switch for the night lights and the camp was bathed in deep red.

"Did you see it?" Munro said. "Did you see what it was?"

They shook their heads. Nobody had seen anything. Elliot checked his tapes; he had only the harsh rattle of gunfire, and the sounds of sparks. No breathing.

The rest of the night passed uneventfully.