MICHAEL CRICHTON

head. And he noticed that her trousers were wrinkled, streaked with dirt from thefall. She still did not look back.“Enjoy the forest,” Munro advised him. “This is the last time you’ll feel cool anddry for quite a while.”Elliot agreed that the forest was pleasant.“Yes, very pleasant.” Munro nodded, with an odd expression on his face.The Barawana Forest was not virginal. From time to time, they passed clearedfields and other signs of human habitation, although they never saw farmers.When Elliot mentioned that fact, Munro just shook his head. As they moveddeeper into the forest Munro turned self-absorbed, unwilling to talk. Yet heshowed an interest in the fauna, frequently pausing to listen intently to bird criesbefore signaling the expedition to continue on.During these pauses, Elliot would look back down the line of porters with loadsbalanced on their heads, and feel acutely his kinship with Livingstone andStanley and the other explorers who had ventured through Africa a centurybefore. And in this, his romantic associations were accurate. Central African lifewas little changed since Stanley explored the Congo in the 1870s, and neitherwas the basic nature of expeditions to that region. Serious exploration was stillcarried out on foot; porters were still necessary; expenses were still daunting—and so were the dangers.By midday, Elliot’s boots had begun to hurt his feet, and he found that he wasexceedingly tired. Apparently the porters were tired too, because they had fallensilent, no longer smoking cigarettes and shouting jokes to one another up anddown the line. The expedition proceeded in silence until Elliot asked Munro ifthey were going to stop for lunch.“No,” Munro said.“Good,” Karen Ross said, glancing at her watch.Shortly after one o’clock, they heard the thumping of helicopters. The reactionof Munro and the porters was immediate—they dived under a stand of large treesand waited, looking upwards. Moments later, two large green helicopters passedoverhead; Elliot clearly read white stenciling: “FZA.”122