led to a place called the Hole, a pit about ten feet deep accessed by shinnying down a pole, from the bottom of which came much of the ore. The two Americans were looking for the Hole but, following their guides, inadvertently passed that shaft by, continuing about two hundred meters along the main shaft to a chamber containing a body of brown, tepid water. Then the local fellows cleared out, leaving Towner and Amman to do a bit of exploring on their own. They dropped down beside the brown lake and found that the chamber branched into three shafts, each of which seemed blocked by standing water. Peering into those shafts, they could see many more bats. The humidity was high and the temperature maybe ten or fifteen degrees hotter than outside. Their goggles fogged up. Their respirators became soggy and wouldn’t pass much oxygen. They were panting and sweating, zipped into their Tyvek suits, which felt like wearing a trash bag, and by now they were becoming “a little loopy,” Amman recalled. One lakeside shaft seemed to curve back around, possibly connecting with the cobra shaft. They didn’t know how deep the water might be, and the airspace above it was limited. Should they proceed? No, they decided, the increased risk wasn’t worth the potential benefit. Formenty, their WHO colleague, eventually found them down there and said, Hey guys, the Hole is back this way. They crawled out and retraced their path, “but by that time we were spent,” Amman said. “We had to get out and cool off.” It was only their first underground excursion at Kitaka. They would make several.
On a later day, the team investigated a grim, remote chamber they dubbed the Cage. It was where one of the four infected miners had been working just before he got sick. This time Amman, Formenty, and Alan Kemp of the NICD went to the far recesses of the cave. The Cage itself could only be entered by crawling through a low gap at the base of a wall—like sliding under a garage door that hasn’t quite closed. Brian Amman is a large man, six foot three and 220 pounds, and for him the gap was a tight squeeze; his helmet got stuck and he had to pull it through separately. “You come out into this sort of blind room,” he said, “and the first thing you see is just hundreds of these dead bats.”
They were Egyptian fruit bats, the creature of interest, left in various stages of mummification and rot. Piles of dead and liquescent bats seemed a bad sign, potentially invalidating the hypothesis that Egyptian fruit bats might be a reservoir host of Marburg. If these bats had died in masses from the virus, then they couldn’t also be its reservoir. Then again, they might have succumbed to earlier efforts by the locals to exterminate them with fire and smoke. Their cause of death was indeterminable without more evidence, and that’s partly why the team was there. If these bats had died of Marburg, suspicion would shift elsewhere—to another bat, or maybe a rodent, or a tick, or a spider? Those other suspects might have to be investigated. Ticks, for instance: There were plenty of them in crevices near the bat roosts, waiting for a chance to drink some blood. Meanwhile, when Amman and Kemp stood up in the Cage, they realized that not every bat in there was dead. The room was aswirl with live ones, circling around their heads.
The two men went to work, collecting. They stuffed dead bats into bags. They caught a few live bats and bagged them too. Then, back down on their bellies, they squooched out through the low gap. “It was really unnerving,” Amman told me. “I’d probably never do it again.” One little accident, he said, a big rock rolls in the way, and that’s it. You’re trapped.
Wait a minute, lemme get this straight: You’re in a cave in Uganda, surrounded by Marburg and rabies and black forest cobras, wading through a slurry of dead bats, getting hit in the face by live ones like Tippi Hedren in The Birds, and the walls are alive with thirsty ticks, and you can hardly breathe, and you can hardly see, and . . . you’ve got time to be claustrophobic?
“Uganda is not famous for its mine rescue teams,” he said.
By the end of this fieldtrip, the scientists had collected about eight hundred bats for dissection and sampling, half of