Catacombs Read Free

gained a firm hold on the southern tribal districts. Only about half of the original stucco remained on the brick walls, and a wooden gallery was in serious disrepair. There was an overhanging tin roof topped with thatch that had been riddled by rats.
    The rats had become so numerous and threatening as the mission population dwindled that a quartet of tough young tomcats recently had been flown in from Mbeya. They patrolled together, for their own safety, and had succeeded in driving the rats from the living and eating areas of the mission grounds. The ecology of Africa is exceptionally fragile, habitat and migratory patterns depending almost entirely on the erratic monsoons. It was now the season of the long rains in East Africa, but even in a good year this crescent of the Rukwa Valley received only about twenty inches of rainfall. This year, so far, there had been almost none; brief showers did little more than settle the laterite dust. With every humid drizzle, the sky seemed to bleed.
    For three weeks the hospital had been crowded with the seriously ill. Surrounding it, almost like a halo, was a corrupt, nauseating odor which Erika had become somewhat accustomed to: She had spent most of her time there since the outbreak of the fever. An abandoned school building nearby was now rapidly filling with blacks from the surrounding villages; in another day or two there would be no more room at the mission.
    Alice left her and went, fiat-footed, heavy in the haunch, toward the auxiliary ward, where a woman's despairing lulloo had interrupted Mme. Callas' passionate mezzo air. Already nearly one hundred fifty cases of the fever of unknown origin had been diagnosed. Sixteen patients, unresponsive to broad spectrum antibiotics and serums for known fevers such as Rift Valley and Congo, had died. A few victims, those under thirty years of age who had contracted the disease, seemed to be recovering. No children had been brought in as yet, and only two of the young soldiers assigned to the mission had been stricken, not seriously. The older you were the more deadly the fever.
    Raymond Poincarré had come out onto the gallery in his short-sleeved smock to drink a cup of fruit juice and smoke a strong cigarette. He was the only doctor the Tanzanian government had sent to them in this emergency. For nearly a month he had worked eighteen hours a day with a staff of native nurses from the Mbeya hospital to contain and attempt to identify the fever. His father was a Belgian, his mother had been a Fipa woman from the valley south of Muse. He'd been out of medical college for less than a year, but Erika thought he would become an outstanding doctor if he wasn't worked to death. His only fault, as she saw it, was a steadfast refusal to discuss or even acknowledge the fact of their involuntary sequestration.
    Poincarré looked at Erika as she negotiated the tilting, creaking stairs to the second floor. He had a high, light-brown forehead and wore gold-rimmed glasses, a miniature gold ring in the lobe of one ear. His face was too youthful to be lined, but these days it had fallen into a pucker of weariness, or resignation. He spoke to her in French, his voice still strained from laryngitis caused by the dust.
    "I'm sorry to get you up so soon; but he was asking for you."
    "Are you sure it's the fever?" Erika said, still in shock. "Chips has had malaria for many years–he could be having a flare-up in spite of the chloroquine."
    "No, he's not malarial. It's a fulminating febrile sickness. Lymphadenopathy is evident. Time will tell." Poincarré didn't sound hopeful. The pitch of the airplane engine had changed as the pilot sought to land. He glanced from the descending aircraft to the livid hollows beneath her eyes. "They should have sent me a good supply of gamma globulin this time. I've asked for it nearly every day. For your safety I suggest that you have an injection. Why haven't you been eating? You mustn't lose any more weight. You'll surely