The Hot Zone: Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

On January 1, 1980, Charles Monet, a Frenchman, lives by himself in Western Kenya near a huge volcano called Mount Elgon. A fifty-six-year-old amateur naturalist and the employee of a nearby sugar factory, Monet is promiscuous, and has many female “friends” in the area.

Richard Preston, the author of the book, goes on a brief digression, relating how difficult it is to find details about the sources of dangerous viruses after the fact. Their effects, he asserts, are so horrific that researchers soon lose sight of the humans at their center.

Monet, it turns out, came to Kenya just as AIDS began to infect humans. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, AIDS spread along the Kinshasa Highway, a new road that spans much of the width of Africa. HIV, Preston explains, is a dangerous but not particularly infective Biosafety Level 2 agent, meaning that it cannot move easily from person to person. In fact, when researchers study live HIV, they don’t even need to wear protective spacesuit gear.

Moving back to Monet, Preston describes the man’s routine, in which he works during the week and explores nearby forests on the weekends. Monet is kind and gentle to animals, especially to monkeys, feeding and even holding them. At night, meanwhile, he generally stays in his house with his housekeeper Johnnie, who cleans and cooks for him. Monet also loves birds. He is friends with a crow, and around Christmastime he tries to care for a sick weaverbird, which dies in his hands. Preston speculates that perhaps the bird died of a Level 4 virus, but says that no one truly knows.

Describing Monet’s walk to work, Preston moves on to describe Mount Elgon, which looms above the surrounding landscape. He recounts how the mountain’s color changes as the light shifts throughout the day, making the mountain seem lovely and mysterious.

Monet has women “friends” in a nearby, impoverished town called Eldoret, and he pays them for sexual intercourse. For Christmas vacation, he invites one of his friends to go camping on Mount Elgon with him, but (Preston tells us) no one can now remember her name.

Monet and his friend drive to a cliff called Endebess Bluff on the side of Mount Elgon. Preston observes that the volcanic dust there is as red as blood. He adds that Mount Elgon is a secluded spot, filled with villagers at its base but with few tourists. The jungle surrounds an old English inn that has now fallen into disrepair. Between Uganda and Kenya, and close to Sudan, Mount Elgon is a rainforest surrounded by plains. Having formed seven to ten million years ago, it is the widest mountain in Africa. Several tribal groups live near the volcano, including the Elgon Massa, who plant crops and raise cattle at its base. Every year, Preston warns, humans move farther up the mountain, cutting down trees and endangering animals such as elephants—thus “strangling the wild habitat.”

After entering the small segment of Mount Elgon that is a national park, Monet and his friend meet a monkey, which sits on his shoulder and eats a banana. They camp near a stream that is “milky with volcanic dust” and surrounded by Cape buffalo. Above them looms the Elgon forest, huge, menacing, and full of wildlife. Preston lists the kinds of life forms and plants that the forest contains, and finishes by describing a past when “[t]housands of elephants lived on the mountain.”

A thunderstorm moves in during the afternoon, and Monet and his friend stay in their tent (with Preston speculating that perhaps they have sex). Afterwards, on New Year’s Eve, they build a fire, cook, and “perhaps” drink champagne.

The next morning, Monet and his friend set off for Kitum Cave, driving as far as they can and then following elephant trails (while staying away from dangerous Cape buffalo). Preston takes the opportunity to describe the cave, which is filled with animals, including elephants, who go there at night to eat minerals and salts. In fact, the cave is so huge that it can hold up to seventy elephants at a time.

Monet and his friend explore the cave, which is enormous (over fifty-five yards across). Surrounded by elephant dung and bat guano, the two see hundreds of bats flying all around them. As they walk farther, they see that Kitum Cave houses a petrified rain forest, which was buried by ash during Mount Elgon’s formation. Around the petrified logs are crystals “sharp as hypodermic needles.”

As Monet and his friend explore, Preston speculates about where their vacation went wrong—perhaps Monet pricked his finger on a crystal. He continues describing the cave, which has bones of ancient hippos, crocodiles, and elephants sticking out of its walls, and is filled with insects. Further in the cave is a crevice filled with the mummified corpses of baby elephants who have slipped and fallen. Even further back is a pillar that supports the roof, already damaged by elephants’ tusks. If they continue to damage the pillar, the roof of Kitum Cave will collapse. Finally, at the back of the cave, a huge number of bats hang on another pillar. Maybe, Preston wonders, Monet touched the guano.

Preston reveals that Monet’s friend resurfaced years after this incident. While working as a prostitute in a bar in Mombasa, Kenya, she meets a doctor who happens to have investigated the Charles Monet case. After talking to the doctor, however, she once again vanishes. By now, she has most likely died of AIDS.

After his vacation Charles Monet returns to his job, but within him “a life form had acquired Charles Monet as a host, and it was replicating.” On January 8, 1980, Monet develops a terrible headache and stays home from work. A temporary housekeeper tries to care for him (Johnnie is on vacation), but he only worsens. Three days later, he becomes feverish and starts vomiting. Meanwhile, his face becomes slack and dead, and he seems totally devoid of energy. His eyeballs become bright red, while his facial skin turns yellow with red spots. Confused though not delirious, Monet becomes “sullen, resentful, and angry.”

After several days Monet’s colleagues check on him, and drive him to a hospital in a city called Kisumu. The doctors at the hospital, stumped, give him an injection of antibiotics, but decide that he should go to Nairobi Hospital. Since he is still mobile, they put him in a taxi and send him to board a Kenya Airways plane. “A hot virus from the rain forest,” Preston warns, “lives within a twenty-four-hour plane flight from every city on earth,” because of an interconnected web of airline routes.

As Monet’s plane, full of passengers, flies towards Nairobi, Preston describes the landscape beneath it. They pass plantations and villages, and Preston reminds readers that Africa is “the place where the human species was born.”

On the small, cramped plane, Monet becomes sick. He vomits continually, and his lips become smeared with bile and blood. His eyes are bright red, while the red spots on his face have melded to form a giant bruise. The connective tissue under his skin, meanwhile, is dissolving, making his face look as if it is falling off his bones. Although his stomach is empty, Monet is vomiting black vomit, which consists mostly of blood—a perfect vehicle for a highly infectious virus. The vomit bag begins to overflow, so Monet closes it and hands it to a flight attendant.

Preston explains that the virus has now saturated Monet’s body in a process called “extreme amplification.” Monet is essentially transforming into a mixture of liquefying flesh and vomit. Beneath the surface, Monet’s blood is clotting, as if his whole body were having a stroke. He cannot feel any pain, however, because the clots have cut off blood flow to his brain. “Depersonalization” begins, a process in which infected people begin to lose their personalities as their brains die. Monet then gets a nosebleed, and though flight attendants give him paper towels, he is unable to stop the blood. Monet finds it difficult to interact with those around him, and he is hostile and monosyllabic—another symptom of the virus.

Monet falls asleep, and Preston again describes the landscape, from the afternoon sun on the valley to the national park filled with zebras and elephants. The plane lands in the airport, and the bloody, dripping Monet gets into a taxi. Preston calls him a “human virus bomb,” and describes the “heavy, dull, and bloated” feeling Monet has in his stomach. The taxi drives through Nairobi, a crowded city brimming with men, women, and children, and finally stops at Nairobi Hospital.

After entering the hospital, Monet sits in the waiting room, where he is surrounded by other people, many of whom are bleeding. As Monet waits, he “crashes,” meaning that he begins to hemorrhage. Blood comes gushing from all of his orifices, and he expels his intestinal lining as well. As blood pools around him, other people move away and a doctor is summoned. The virus, Preston relates, has “destroyed its host” and is attempting to find another.