MICHAEL CRICHTON

known about the Congo. The ancient Egyptians on the upper Nile knew onlythat their river originated far to the south, in a region they called the Land ofTrees. This was a mysterious place with forests so dense they were as dark asnight in the middle of the day. Strange creatures inhabited this perpetual gloom,including little men with tails, and animals half black and half white.For nearly four thousand years afterward, nothing more substantial waslearned about the interior of Africa. The Arabs came to East Africa in the seventhcentury A.D., in search of gold, ivory, spices, and slaves. But the Arabs weremerchant seamen and did not venture inland. They called the interior Zinj—theLand of the Blacks—a region of fable and fantasy. There were stories of vastforests and tiny men with tails; stories of mountains that spewed fire and turnedthe sky black; stories of native villages overwhelmed by monkeys, which wouldhave congress with the women; stories of great giants with hairy bodies and flatnoses; stories of creatures half leopard, half man; stories of native marketswhere the fattened carcasses of men were butchered and sold as a delicacy.Such stories were sufficiently forbidding to keep the Arabs on the coast,despite other stories equally alluring: mountains of shimmering gold, riverbedsgleaming with diamonds, animals that spoke the language of men, great junglecivilizations of unimaginable splendor. In particular, one story was repeated againand again in early accounts: the story of the Lost City of Zinj.According to legend, a city known to the Hebrews of Solomonic times hadbeen a source of inconceivable wealth in diamonds. The caravan route to the cityhad been jealously guarded, passed from father to son, as a sacred trust forgeneration after generation. But the diamond mines were exhausted and the cityitself now lay in crumbling ruins, somewhere in the dark heart of Africa. Thearduous caravan routes were long since swallowed up by jungle, and the lasttrader who remembered the way had carried his secret with him to the gravemany hundreds of years before.This mysterious and alluring place the Arabs called the Lost City of Zinj. * Yetdespite its enduring fame, Johnson could find few detailed descriptions of thecity. In 1187 Ibn Baratu, an Arab in Mombasa, recorded that “the natives of theregion tell. . . of a lost city far inland, called Zinj. There the inhabitants, who areblack, once lived in wealth and luxury, and even the slaves decoratedthemselves with jewels and especially blue diamonds, for a great store ofdiamonds is there.”In 1292, a Persian named Mohammed Zaid stated that “a large [the size]diamond of a man’s clenched fist . . was exhibited on the streets of Zanzibar, and43