Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus

by David Quammen

So the team began asking local people, with Fagbo as interpreter: Do you have any bats around here? The Arabic word for bats, to Epstein’s recollection, sounds like “huffa-fish.” So here were five men, including Epstein—who is tall and short-haired, and in khakis as he was then could pass for a major in the U.S. Marines—roaming around Bisha, showing people pictures of the bats and asking for leads. Epstein even climbed to some overlooks in the hills, scanning with his binoculars to try to spot bats flying up at dusk. Fagbo warned him: “Don’t point those binoculars towards anyone’s house because they will immediately assume, you know, you’re looking at their family.” Finally, a man in a vehicle said, Yes, come, I’ll take you to them. They jumped in the man’s car, almost without thinking. Later it seemed injudicious. “If there’s ever a textbook definition of what not to do when you’re in another country,” Epstein told me, chuckling at his lapse in caution, “never having been there before, not speaking the language—you don’t get into a car with a total stranger who says, ‘Yes, I’ll show you where the bats are. They’re just outside of town.’ ” Especially you don’t jump into that car if you look like a Marine officer doing recon.