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low down, the belt missing two loops on the trousers of the Hugo Boss suit.
    No, she would not speak ill of the dead.

    Today was a day in hell. We spent four hours on our hands and knees digging out the Land Rover and packing brushwood into the ruts beneath it. The rain hasn’t stopped for two days, and the mud made us look like we had been dipped in melted chocolate. Georg said there is supposed to be a better wet-season crossing of the Asa, but we couldn’t find it.
    Just as we finished two women came to the river to collect water, and we were told that Zizunga was only fifteen minutes walk away. It took longer with the Land Rover because we had to cut down some trees to get it through the bush, and we finally emerged into a muddy paddock surrounded by two dozen rickety shacks, to be met by a horde of excited children. They rushed us to a hut where two middle-aged Belgian nuns, Sisters Margaret and Annette, were tending the sick woman, whose name was Dr Sophie Hofhaus. Her husband, a Brazilian entomologist named Dr Jarman Herrera, was holding her hand.
    Sophie must once have been a beautiful woman, with large brown eyes and delicate cheekbones, but now she looked as waxy as a corpse. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes sunken. Dried spume crusted her cracked lips. Georg asked Jarman about her illness. He doesn’t think it is dysentery. Georg delicately raised the possibility of rabies, but Jarman replied that his wife was inoculated and hadn’t in any case been bitten by any of the monkeys for months. She has also been inoculated against yellow fever, so that’s out. Jarman said that he’d looked at a sample of Sophie’s blood under his microscope and at first had thought it might be malaria, but when the nuns used the ParaSight test kit it came back negative. Jarman was still convinced it was some kind of blood infection.
    We loaded her as best we could into the Land Rover, while Jarman stroked her face and talked to her. There wasn’t room for everybody in the vehicle, so Tomas and Salvation stayed behind at Zizunga with Sister Annette. Amy rigged up a saline drip and gave Sophie an injection to stop her convulsions.
    Just as we were about to go, Sister Margaret roared up on a muddy motorcycle, wearing engineers’ boots and crash helmet. Jarman told me that in 1966, before she took holy orders, Sister Margaret had crossed the Sahara on the very same aged Husqvarna. She was an excellent mechanic, and if the Land Rover broke down she would either be able to fix it, or ride off to fetch help. Without the motorcycle it would have been impossible for her to keep in contact with outlying villages, to visit the sick and comfort the bereaved.
    Jarman said that the army had done its best to make Zizunga a ghost town. They had come roaring through three months ago and conscripted all the men aged between fifteen and thirty five. They had also helped themselves to most of the maize, yam and manioc that was surplus from the last harvest.
    At four in the afternoon Georg radioed ahead to Kisangani to find out if the Cessna and pilot chartered by the Swiss company that owns the research centre were on their way to Ubulu. He was told that they should be at the landing strip by seven the next morning. The only way to make the rendezvous was to drive right through the night. Motorcycling though, would be too exhausting. We urged Sister Margaret to turn back if she was to get home before dark, but she refused. Finally we compromised. The motorcycle was tied onto the roof rack while Sister Margaret squeezed onto the front seat between me and Georg.
    For hours we bumped and slithered and crashed along the worst forest tracks I have ever seen. Jarman never once let go of Sophie’s hand. He told me they had met at a science faculty at Graz in Austria when he was an exchange student interested in moths and beetles and she something of a star in the zoology department. It wasn’t love at first sight for