MICHAEL CRICHTON

with computerized equipment, the acronymic complexity of the entire operationsuggested that Earth Resources Technology had powerful resources behind it,perhaps even a military association.Karen Ross laughed. “We’re much too organized to be military.” She then toldhim the background of the ERTS interest in Virunga. Like the Project Amy staff,Karen Ross had also stumbled upon the legend of the Lost City of Zinj. But shehad drawn very different conclusions from the story.During the last three hundred years, there had been several attempts to reachthe lost city. In 1692, John Marley, an English adventurer, led an expedition oftwo hundred into the Congo; it was never heard from again. In 1744, a Dutchexpedition went in; in 1804, another British party led by a Scottish aristocrat, SirJames Taggert, approached Virunga from the north, getting as far as theRawana bend of the Ubangi River. He sent an advance party farther south, but itnever returned.In 1872, Stanley passed near the Virunga region but did not enter it; in 1899, aGerman expedition went in, losing more than half its party. A privately financedItalian expedition disappeared entirely in 1911. There had been no more recentsearches for the Lost City of Zinj.“So no one has ever found it,” Elliot said.Ross shook her head. “I think several expeditions found the city,” she said.“But nobody ever got back out again.”Such an outcome was not necessarily mysterious. The early days of Africanexploration were incredibly hazardous. Even carefully managed expeditions losthalf of their party or more. Those who did not succumb to malaria, sleepingsickness, and blackwater fever faced rivers teeming with crocodiles and hippos,jungles with leopards and suspicious, cannibalistic natives. And, for all itsluxuriant growth, the rain forest provided little edible food; a number ofexpeditions had starved to death.“I began,” Ross said to Elliot, “with the idea that the city existed, after all.Assuming it existed, where would I find it?”The Lost City of Zinj was associated with diamond mines, and diamonds werefound with volcanoes. This led Ross to look along the Great Rift Valley—anenormous geological fault thirty miles wide, which sliced vertically up the eastern59