The Hot Zone

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Charles Monet was a loner. He was a Frenchman who lived by himself in a little wooden bungalow on the private lands of Nzoia Sugar Factory, a plantation in western Kenya what spread along the Nzoia River within sight of Mount Elgon, a huge, solitary extinct volcano that rises to a height of fourteen thousand feet near the edge of the Rift Valley. Monet’s history is a little obscure. As with so many expatriates who end up in Africa, it is not clear what brought him there. Perhaps he had been in some kind of trouble in France, or perhaps he had been drawn to Kenya by the beauty of the country. He was an amateur naturalist, fond of birds and animals but not of humanity in general. He was fifty-six years old, of medium height and medium build, with smooth, straight brown hair, a good-looking man. It seems that his only close friends were women who lived in towns around the mountain, yet even they could not recall much about him for the doctors who investigated his death. His job was to take care of the sugar factory’s water-pumping machinery, which drew water from the Nzoia River and delivered it to many miles of sugar-cane fields. They say that he spent most of his day inside the pump house by the river, as if it pleased him to watch and listen to machines doing their work.

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