Qualla: Kitum Cave https://qualla.com/kitum-cave en-us © 2026 Bendyline Mon, 20 Jul 2026 10:21:29 GMT Qualla serial false Qualla support@bendyline.com yes https://qualla.com/_res/siteimages/rsslogo.png Qualla: Kitum Cave https://qualla.com/kitum-cave Kitum Cave: Introduction https://qualla.com/kitum-cave/ At night, the elephants come to mine. They walk nearly two hundred meters into the darkness of Kitum Cave, deep inside the side of Mount Elgon, feeling their way along walls of volcanic rock that hold what they crave: salt. With their tusks they pry loose chunks of the cave wall, then chew and swallow the rock to get the sodium their bodies need. They have done this for so many generations that scientists believe the elephants themselves have helped excavate the cave, gouging it deeper into the mountain one tusk-stroke at a time. The walls are scratched and furrowed like the inside of a quarry - because, in a sense, that is exactly what it is.

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/0/t/kitum-cave-wp/sb0t-kitum-cave-intro.mp3 0:06 1 full Kitum Cave: A Cave Carved by Tusks https://qualla.com/kitum-cave/ Kitum Cave is one of five "elephant caves" on Mount Elgon, the eroded volcano straddling the Kenya-Uganda border. It is not a lava tube, as people sometimes assume, but a cave formed in pyroclastic rock - the compacted debris of ancient eruptions - and it runs about two hundred m...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/0/t/kitum-cave-wp/sb0t-kitum-cave-a-cave-carved-by-tusks.mp3 0:06 2 full Kitum Cave: Two Visitors, Two Deaths https://qualla.com/kitum-cave/ In the 1980s, the cave became the center of a medical mystery that would unsettle the world. Two people who visited Kitum fell gravely ill afterward with Marburg virus disease, a rare and ferocious hemorrhagic fever related to Ebola. In 1980, a French man died after visiting the ...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/0/t/kitum-cave-wp/sb0t-kitum-cave-two-visitors-two-deaths.mp3 0:06 3 full Kitum Cave: The Hunt for the Source https://qualla.com/kitum-cave/ Two deaths, years apart, in the same remote cave - it was the kind of pattern that demanded an answer. The United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases mounted an expedition to Kitum to find whatever was carrying the virus, sampling animals and insects, in...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/0/t/kitum-cave-wp/sb0t-kitum-cave-the-hunt-for-the-source.mp3 0:06 4 full Kitum Cave: An Answer in the Guano https://qualla.com/kitum-cave/ The resolution came two decades later, and from elsewhere. In 2007, after two miners contracted Marburg in active mines in Gabon and Uganda, researchers found clear evidence of the virus living in cave-dwelling Egyptian fruit bats. The Ugandan mines harbored colonies of the very ...

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]]> Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT https://qualla.com/_m/s/b/0/t/kitum-cave-wp/sb0t-kitum-cave-an-answer-in-the-guano.mp3 0:06 5 full