In the Valley of the Kings: Stories Read Free

first wave in a distinct progression. Whether the onset was marked by dreamy confusion, giddiness, or fluently unintelligible speech, within twelve hours all such symptoms had lapsed into one: an uncontrollable paranoia, in which the sufferer was convinced that every object in the world, animate or inanimate, was involved in a vast conspiracy to do the patient harm.
    Without exception, in this stage of the disease its victims spoke continuously for periods of up to twenty-four hours, offering elaborately detailed descriptions of the delusional system in which they were enmeshed. And without exception, the attending physicians reported that they had at times to fight off the conviction that their patients’ nightmares were real. Who can blame them? Confronted with an undeniable health emergency, swift to spread, invariably fatal, and marked at its heart by the inscrutable symbol of the word, little wonder that those who struggled to understand the disease struggled as well with fear. Unlike their patients, who had evolved an explanation for the menace within them, their doctors had no such comfort, and could only watch their patients die, and wonder helplessly if they had contracted the plague as well.
    For plague, by the end of the first week of September, it had become. There is little point in going over the statistics of that hellish week: the figures beggar comprehension, and mere repetition will not suffice to make them meaningful. Certainly their import was dulled by the more immediate, personal tragedies that struck almost every household in the country at that time. And as the numbers grew to embrace other nations, other languages, their meaning became in no way more intelligible. No more than did the word, which, as it appeared in different nations, took on different forms, but had everywhere the same effect.
     
     
    AT THIS TIME , little remains to report, but I would like to offer before I close two or three items that strike me as significant. The first, as I have hinted, was almost lost in the events that followed so quickly on the disease’s emergence into the public eye. But Professor Salomon’s team, in the weeks between her death and theirs, continued its research into the origins of the contagion. And though the trail had by then grown cold, the scent was not so faint that they could find in this an excuse for the failure of their investigations: the disease was untraceable, they concluded, because it had no physical cause.
    And here I find one of the most pathetic effects of this disease—the kind of case in which its action was so grievous because so clearly marked. One of Salomon’s survivors, a geneticist, whom I had known slightly during our years together at the university, and who was one of the few men I have ever met who might have deserved to be called a genius, telephoned me on the day the disease took hold of him. While I kept him on the phone, in the thirty minutes before help arrived I listened as he spun out the delusion that had come on him with the word. The spectacle, if I may call it that, of a mind of his caliber reduced to raving brought me close to tears.
    But I feel obligated to report what he said to me that day, in part because it was my only immediate contact with a victim of the plague. And also because one aspect of the encounter still strikes me, somehow, as significant. I believed. All the time I was speaking to him, I found myself fighting off conviction. Naturally, the feeling passed, but I still find myself, several weeks later, struggling with a sense of opportunity missed: I felt at the time, and still in my weaker moments do, as though I had come close to penetrating the mystery of the word. This is, of course, one of the effects most frequently reported by those attending on the dying.
    The disease, my caller insisted, was not, properly speaking, a plague. That is to say, it was not spread by any of the infectious mechanisms. The word was not a pathogen: it was a