symptoms of Ebola! They never even lived in a place with an Ebola outbreak. So we ask ourselves, where did they get their exposure?”
“From the bats,” Henry ventured.
“Very likely, but why did they not become ill? How did they attain this immunity?” She explained that the antibodies of people who had been exposed reacted to specific proteins of the Ebola virus in the same way that some successful vaccines had done in test trials. “We can only conclude that these people are naturally protected. We still don’t know why.”
“It could be false positives,” Henry said. “Or perhaps a virus epidemic similar to Ebola that is not pathogenic.”
“Yes, of course we thought of this, but so far such a disease has not been detected here.”
Every new pandemic raised a question that had confounded medicine since the earliest days: Why were some people immune to novel diseases that otherwise run rampant through populations? Twenty to 30 percent of people who were infected with influenza never manifested symptoms. Studies of sex workers in Nairobi showed that some prostitutes were naturally immune to HIV. There was also a small portion of people with northern European ancestry who were able to be infected with HIV but never developed symptoms. In both cases, it may have been a mutation of the CCR5 gene, which was required for the virus to invade the cell. These were interesting discoveries, but so far they had never led to a vaccine or a treatment for any of the diseases.
On the last night of Henry’s visit, Dr. Méyé took him to visit Albert Schweitzer’s modest grave, and afterward they ate dinner under a thatched umbrella at a little fish café on the riverbank.
Henry looked out at something moving in the river.
“Is that a snake?” he asked.
“It’s a bird. We call it a snakebird because it looks so much like a snake with its head out of the water.”
“I’ve always been afraid of the jungle,” Henry confessed.
“What is it that frightens you?” she asked.
“I think of the wilderness as being a place of death.”
“But it is actually so full of life!” she said. “I think that is why Dr. Schweitzer came here, the abundance of living creatures, the diversity, people say he bathed in it—is that correct English? That he took a bath in all this life, everywhere around him.”
“It’s certainly a vivid way of describing it.”
Henry went on to talk about how affected he had been by Schweitzer’s example and philosophy. Although Henry was an atheist and Schweitzer a highly unorthodox Lutheran missionary, his ideas took root in Henry’s philosophy. Schweitzer had been steaming up this very river, through a herd of hippopotamuses, searching in his mind for a universal basis for ethical behavior, one that stood above religious formulations. The answer came to him in a single phrase: “There flashed upon my mind, unforeseen and unsought: Reverence for Life,” he wrote. Ethics, Schweitzer decided, was nothing more than that. “Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting and enhancing life, and that to destroy, to harm or to hinder life is evil.” Those words lived in Henry’s heart. The animal rights and environmental movements were born, in part, in Albert Schweitzer’s writings. Henry said that his admiration for Schweitzer was something he shared with his boss, Jürgen Stark.
At the mention of Jürgen’s name, Dr. Méyé’s face turned expressionless.
“Do you know him?” Henry asked.
“We have met,” she said. “Like you, he came here.”
“Really? He didn’t tell me that.”
“As a pilgrim. To see the grave. We get them every year. They are idealists, of course, or they wouldn’t make such a long trip. Usually, we enjoy them.”
“But not Jürgen?”
“You know him better than I.” She turned her attention to the river, apparently not inclined to say anything else. Then she added, “Some people carry this philosophy too far. They look at the damage mankind does to the natural world, and they forget that humans are animals as well, and also deserving of reverence.”
“He is a rather cold personality, I would say.”
“I thought he was frightening.”
“How so?”
But Dr. Méyé would not go further. “I scarcely know him,” she pleaded. “I’ve said too much already.”
When Henry returned to Fort Detrick he brought along a bad case of norovirus, that gastrointestinal scourge of cruise ships. It was ferociously contagious, though less so for people with B and AB blood types. Unfortunately, Henry’s blood type was O. So far nobody had figured out why blood type had