Ecuador

Daniel Seibold glared out his window. Seibold was not a scenery man. He despised sunsets, historic monuments, Christmas lawn displays, and his mother's marigolds.

But the shabby blue minibus had struggled valiantly up steep mountain grades, around hairpin turns, past sheer drop-offs marked with white crosses, and across several precarious-looking bridges their host proudly identified as "feats of modern Ecuadorian engineering." Now they idled on a rocky ledge their host insisted on calling a scenic lookout. Disembarking and admiring the view was, clearly, obligatory.

The bus door opened with a pneumatic wheeze. Seibold's traveling companions, a trio of incoming McCreadie Fellows and their wives, gathered up purses, cameras, sunglasses, sweaters, and guidebooks. All talking at once, they made their way to the front. "I hope there won't be any snakes!" cried the tow-haired woman to no one in particular. "I'm petrified of them!"

"Have no fear! Douglas is here!" the man named Douglas yelled over his shoulder as they descended.

Seibold had situated himself in the seat furthest to the rear, the better to avoid conversation. Glad the others were gone, he leaned back, crossed his arms, and propped his dusty hiking boots on the seat across the aisle. Out of the corner of his eye he saw his fellow passengers' heads pass his window.

Their driver, a dark-skinned young man of obvious Indian origin, nodded to Seibold and touched his fingers to the brim of his battered gray fedora. Seibold said nothing. What he, Daniel Seibold, wanted right now was not a panoramic vista. What he, Daniel Seibold, wanted right now was an A & W Bacon Double Cheeseburger with extra pickles. Fat chance he would see one of those for a while.

He studied their conveyance. The bus's blue vinyl upholstery was cracked, the metal trim around its windows speckled with corrosion, the paint overhead peeling in beige curls. No doubt about it: this was a rustbucket. No worse than his car at home, of course, but they were important visitors. Even (to hear Chiriboga tell it) exalted dignitaries.

The driver turned again. His brow furrowed; Seibold guessed the man wanted something. "Señor?" the man said, gesturing toward the door. Hell, Seibold thought: I'd better get out. Get some fresh air. Get a feel for the countryside.

He stood up, shoved his plaid shirt into the waist, and jammed his hands into his faded jeans pockets. Approaching the door, an object in the center of the dashboard caught his attention. When he got closer he saw what it was: a small plastic statue of a woman in a long blue gown and white veil. Seibold was a devout atheist and supposed the figure must be a primitive deity or good luck totem. He nodded to the driver. The man smiled broadly. The man's teeth were a few rotten stumps.

Seibold descended the two steps to the gravel roadway, strolled a pace, and leaned against the bus's dusty fender. Shading his eyes with his hand, he took in the scene before him.

It was true. The view was impressive. He hated to admit it, but the view was very impressive. Better even than a movie. Ten yards ahead of him, the ledge on which they stood dropped into a valley several hundred feet below. The valley spread to the left and right for hundreds of yards. There, at its farthest edges, the valley floor met a sky so high and wide and blue he had seen its like only in Cinemascope. In Cinemascope and Technicolor. The valley and the sky went on and on and on. It was across just such gaping valleys and under just such enormous skies that John Wayne rode, bringing justice and hails of bullets to the Wild West.

Instantly he realized his comparison was wrong. The scene wasn't remotely like a John Wayne western. This was no trackless desert. Here were no shifting sands, no tawny buttes, no tumbleweed, no bleached bones, no circling vultures. This valley was green . It was not, however, the green he thought of as True Green: the green of the visible spectrum. The green before him was deep and dark--lush like the green of evergreen trees or Kentucky pastures or thick moss on wet stones.

Here and there the greenness was interrupted by outcroppings of black rock and filaments of silver. Over there he could make out a slender silver ribbon of river laid along the valley floor. Beyond the river, a gleaming silver net threaded its way through the velvety green expanse. His eyes followed the net until its silver strands dissolved into the distance.

Straight ahead of him the second departure from John Wayne movies--literally--arose. Straight ahead, where the horizon should have been, low green and black ridges took shape. The ridges multiplied, grew larger, and gathered into formidable green and black Andean mountains, mountains as large as any he had seen from his airplane window. Under ordinary circumstances, such mountains would have been imposing. But behind these particular mountains loomed Mt. Cotopaxi: Mt. Cotopaxi, the world's highest active volcano, a gleaming black basalt pyramid crowned with snow, dominating the nearer peaks and the cloudless azure sky. No John Wayne movie Seibold had ever seen featured anything like Mt. Cotopaxi.

The others--three men, three women, and Chiriboga, their host--adjusted their cameras, flipped through their guidebooks, and muttered touristical platitudes. One of the couples conferred; Seibold caught the words "nineteen thousand plus," referring, no doubt, to Cotopaxi's height. The tall, white-haired man walked closer to the lookout's edge. The man had punned atrociously the entire ride. Now he threw back his shoulders and in a stentorian voice began declaiming some bit of doggerel about magnificent tableaux. His wife, a grim-looking woman with short, gray hair and thick, crepe-soled shoes, snapped, "Not now, Ben!" With a rueful grimace at the others, Ben fell silent.

"No snakes here!" the man named Doug announced in the direction of the tow-haired woman.

The wind died. Except for the soft sputtering of the minibus, the scenic lookout was still. The tow-haired woman stood at the distant end of the group. "How can you be sure?" she shrieked.

"No slam!" he shouted.

"What?" she shouted back.

The man named Doug took one or two steps in her direction. "No slam!"

She cupped her hand to her ear. "WHAT?"

"No droppings! No excrement! No SHIT!" he yelled.

There was a long pause. "Oh," she said, lifting her eyebrows and looking at the others. "Well, thank heaven for small favors!"

The others milled about; Chiriboga offered commentaries on their present altitude and the distance in kilometers to other centers of culture and learning. The tow-haired woman began to tug on a strap dangling from the opening of her capacious straw bag. A pair of binoculars emerged, and with it a cataract of used Kleenex, small coins, and crumpled chewing gum wrappers. A cool gust blew across the lookout, caught the gum wrappers, and lifted them in widening spirals up and beyond the lookout's edge. There in the empty space above the valley, they floated like immense green and silver snowflakes.

This is fascinating, Seibold thought, taking a few steps in their direction. The updraft must be formidable, to keep the paper and aluminum foil suspended in midair that way. What would happen next? Would they be blown higher by a thermal, or drop into the valley? Probably rise. The Bernoulli effect--

"Damn it!" the tow-haired woman snapped. She had set down her bag, stooped, and begun to pick up the dropped coins, but not, Seibold saw, the Kleenex. Hanging from her neck, the binoculars knocked against her knees; she muttered expostulations against the wind, the sun, and the absence of asphalt pavement. The man Seibold supposed was her husband paid no attention. Oblivious to the diesel exhaust, he seemed absorbed in a spiky clump of grass growing in the crushed rock beneath the bus's rear tire. He must be the agricultural expert from Michigan State.

Bored by this paltry domestic drama, Seibold returned his gaze to the spot where the gum wrapper snowflakes had hovered. They were gone. There was no guard rail at the lookout. He was not tempted to step forward and peer over the edge. It was a long way down.

"Nice," the brown-haired woman said vaguely, flipping a page in her guidebook. Her voice was flat, nasal. "Doug, isn't it nice?"

Doug shrugged his shoulders, kicked the gravel, and looked away. "If it's your kind of thing."

"It's a wonder we're alive to see it, considering our driver," the tow-haired woman said with disgust. Now she was standing and peering through her binoculars, rapidly twiddling the focus knob. She reminded Seibold of that stupid girl in his high school biology class who cranked her microscope adjustment down with such force she continually broke her slides. Miss Crunch-and-Tinkle they called her.

Cameras clicked. Permutations and combinations of the travelers and Chiriboga arranged themselves before the Mt. Cotopaxi backdrop. The tow-haired woman's husband was squatting beside the clump of grass and running his fingers through it in a contemplative fashion. What was it, Seibold wondered. A new crop? An interesting mutation of an old crop? An illegal drug?

Seibold resumed his stance against the idling bus and squinted at the volcano. Mt. Cotopaxi was the first active volcano he'd ever seen. He closed his eyes and marshalled the power of his extraordinary intelligence, willing Cotopaxi to do something dramatic to demonstrate its active status. A moderate earthquake would be great, a blast of steam or volcanic gas even better. An eruption featuring rivers of fast-moving lava would make the entire trip to Ecuador worth it.

He opened his eyes. He waited. Nothing happened.

Behind Cotopaxi, the blue of the sky was unlike anything he, a son of the hazy American midwest, had ever seen: clear and hypnotic as cobalt glass. The equatorial sun was nearly blinding, and he lifted his hand to shade his eyes. Funny about the sun. In spite of its intensity, it wasn't hot. At sea level--in Guayaquil, Ecuador's principal port on the Pacific Ocean--the temperature on a day like today would be sweltering. But here and in Quito the altitude entirely tempered the heat, producing (as his guidebook promised) "spring-like weather all year round." Today's high would be sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Yesterday it was sixty-seven degrees. Three months from now it would be sixty-nine.

Cotopaxi was spectacular, all right. Strange to be here. Strange to be so far from what his analytical geometry teacher (in a rare moment of whimsy) once called their "midwestern planes." Their midwestern Flatland and its endless fields of corn.

Seibold had been hired by the Ecuadorian government to teach political science at the University of Quito. Additionally (or, perhaps, principally--it wasn't clear), he would advise Ecuador's president on the running of his reelection campaign. "On the conduction of a veritably modern campaign," the letter from the Ecuadorian government explained--

"He is magnificent, is he not?" Chiriboga said into Seibold's ear, startling him. Seibold had already noted--but was not yet accustomed to--the penchant of South Americans for standing very close when they talked. Chiriboga was the Director of Quito's International Center, and in charge of the tour to Mt. Cotopaxi. He was also in charge of visiting scholars, their accommodations and, it seemed, their perfect happiness.

Seibold stared at Chiriboga. Beneath his cream-colored Panama hat, Chiriboga grinned and waited, hands clasped behind his back, rocking slightly. The others were still taking pictures and uttering inanities; "he" must refer to the volcano, not a fellow traveler.

Seibold saw something was expected of him. Something about the volcano. He struggled to think what. He took a deep breath, cleared his throat, and felt a mild surge of lightheadedness. Probably the effect of the rarified atmosphere at their present altitude. Every night he climbed two long flights of stairs to his hotel room and arrived at his door gasping. At this moment, at this observation point, they were even higher than Quito's ten thousand feet. Everything shimmered slightly. It must be the altitude. Or the intensity of the sun's rays at the Equator. Maybe he should have had more than two Cokes for breakfast.

"Interesting," he said to Chiriboga, staring in the volcano's direction and making a mental note to purchase some decent sunglasses when they returned to Quito. Actually, Cotopaxi wasn't a pyramid. More of a cone, a flared cone like an inverted gravity well. "Very symmetrical," he added. As a youth he had won the Westinghouse prize for mathematics. He was now twenty-eight.

Chiriboga's round, toast-colored face gave no hint of disappointment at this answer. He threw up his hands in admiration, wriggled his caterpillar-like mustache, and grinned more broadly. His teeth were very white; several glistened with gold crowns.

"Professor Say-bold," Chiriboga said, giving his name a Spanish pronunciation, "that is a most original answer! You are certainly correct! Mt. Cotopaxi is MOST delightfully symmetrical as seen from this place. But I do not believe I have heard any of our visitors comment on this fact before! Not even our Japanese visitors, who admire Cotopaxi so greatly, as they think it an admirable counterfoil for their Mountain Fuji. This is what comes from being a mathematical genius! Ah, to see the world in your eyes!"

"I don't know. . . ." Seibold mumbled, running his hand down his beard and wishing Chiriboga would be quiet. He was discomfited by the effusiveness, by the reference in front of others to his mathematical abilities. He was especially discomfited by the newly-bestowed title "Professor." Several of his friends were already professors, but for him the word "professor" reeked of white-haired men, blackboards, and chalk.

It had all come about in a way even Seibold, brilliant at solving puzzles, did not entirely fathom. He had managed and won the reelection campaign of an incumbent Democratic United States Senator. Deftly bucking 1980's conservative, anti-incumbent fever that tossed out President Jimmy Carter, Seibold masterminded a sixty-one percent come-from-behind win for his man. The victory was considered spectacular and earned him a dependent clause in Newsweek .

When the Senator was safely reinstalled in Washington, Seibold did not follow. He had performed a miracle, but it gave him no joy. To the astonishment of all who knew him--and none knew him very well--he announced he would quit running campaigns, and "Do Something Else."

For the entire month of December, Doing Something Else meant staying at home (he lived in his mother's tiny ranch house), watching Monty Python episodes and antique science fiction movies. This alarmed his mother. She believed watching Monty Python episodes and antique science fiction movies was a symptom of serious illness.

One gloomy January afternoon he was deeply engaged in one of his three favorite movies, The Thing. The Thing had just thawed out and was about to make its first unwelcome appearance at the scientific station. At the periphery of his vision he saw his mother pushing her ottoman alongside his favorite television-watching chair and plopping down beside him, her brown hair still wound on pink sponge curlers, her plump face rumpled in consternation. He endeavored to ignore her.

"Danny," she said finally, twisting the ties of her pink housecoat around her pudgy pink fingers, "I'm SO worried about you." Her voice shifted into the irritating whine so frequent a feature of her inquiries. "All day long you sit around and do nothing. Are you sick? Should I call Dr. Goodman?"

He snorted and shook his head no.

Her voice shifted to a higher pitch. "Let me call Dr. Goodman. ETHEL'S BOY had MONONUCLEOSIS his sophomore year in college." She shoved her hand under his right ear and poked. "ETHEL'S BOY dragged around for WEEKS--had swollen glands as big as ORANGES. Or was it grapefruit. . . ."

Seibold was not the kind of person who was, in modern parlance, "in touch with his feelings." Usually he was sure he had no feelings at all. At that particular moment, however, he knew he was mad: his mother was interrupting The Thing during one of its best parts.

Daniel Seibold was a facts man, a reasons man. Life to him was a differential equation to be solved. It was futile to explain to his mother (whom he viewed as well-intentioned, but not bright) that when he watched television, or read MAD magazine, or drove downtown for a revival of The Day the Earth Stood Still, he was not expending all his considerable mental energies on watching television or reading MAD or attending a movie.

Movies and books and television were, in computer jargon, programs being run while other programs ran in the background. He was fully capable of thinking through several different problems at once. What He Was Going To Do Next With His Life was sorting itself out subliminally. But it took time. And it required the peace and quiet in which to do that sorting.

On that particular winter's afternoon, he grunted at his mother, shoved her hand away from his glands, and leapt up from his television-watching chair. Oblivious to her quivering lower lip and the fat tears that slid from her eyes, he stalked into his bedroom, grabbed a dirty flannel shirt from the doorknob and his parka from his closet floor, and stalked out the front door, which he slammed. After dusting the snow off the windshield of his old Chevy, he started the engine with a vengeance and roared down their short driveway. It was an impressive leavetaking, only slightly diminished by his discovery, after he'd driven more than a mile, that he'd forgotten his wallet.

For several weeks thereafter, he drove aimlessly through the midwest, savoring the scenic wonders of Michigan's Thumb, and the industrial splendors of Gary, Indiana. Here and there he stopped to take in an old movie or an A & W Bacon Double Cheeseburger. Now and then he returned home long enough to check his messages, remove money from his sock drawer, and put on a different shirt. On those occasions his mother quizzed him in a tremulous voice. "Mom," he would say, lifting his left eyebrow and addressing her in the resonant, brooks-no-nonsense tone the Senator once called Seibold's Voice Imperial, "I've got a lead on a job."

This statement was not completely false, yet it made him uneasy: in spite of his successful career in politics, Seibold was never quite comfortable when lying to his mother.

In March, a jaunt to Indianapolis, Toledo, and Ann Arbor brought him to the apartment of a former college roommate, now an assistant professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. Seibold and the former roommate dined at the Pretzel Bell with several of the roommate's cronies, one of them a young Ecuadorian who taught civil engineering. The dinner conversation touched on several urgent topics, including Ann Arbor's newest drive-through beer depot, the two young women at the table against the wall (just visible through the smoke, and possibly quite attractive), the future of the University of Michigan basketball team (rosy), their steaks (overdone) and what could be expected from the newly-elected Reagan Administration (The End of Western Civilization As We Know It).

Several weeks later Seibold's mother thrust into his hands a large, battered envelope decorated in colorful foreign postage stamps. The letter inside, typed in uneven letters on heavy ivory paper with an embossed gold crest, invited him to assume a guest lectureship in political science at the University of Quito, in Quito, Ecuador, commencing September 1981. The lectureship ("your very minor duties will at most encompass the instruction of only one class," the invitation explained) was to run concurrently with "the establishment of a modern campaign organization dedicated to the reelection of our President, the Honorable Dr. Osvaldo Velásquez Darquea." The letter was signed by a Carlos Proaño, Special Assistant to the President of Ecuador.

Seibold was astounded. He sat down on the edge of his unmade bed to read the letter a second time. The salary mentioned in the letter was five small figures--astronomical to Seibold, accustomed to the parsimony of political employment. Accommodations, travel, expenses, a car--all would be paid for. It would be a real job, his first real job, as he had been a full-time student most of his life when not conducting political campaigns.

His bedroom was suffocating: too warm and reeking from his mother's most recent administration of powerful floral-scented air fresheners and Lysol. He leapt up and bolted through the tiny kitchen into the back yard. There, coatless, his hiking boots making zigzags in the inch of powdery snow, he strolled back and forth, considering the letter.

It would be an interesting job. It would combine travel with the opportunity to make enough money to move out of his mom's house, as well as buy an Altair Computer Kit, a technological marvel he'd read about in a Popular Mechanics feature and conceived a lust for. And so, after driving thousands more miles around the midwest playing a "The Joy of Spanish" tape in a tape recorder on the passenger seat, he kissed his sobbing mother goodbye ("Danny, don't drink the water!" were her parting words) and boarded--

His head snapped up. He wasn't in the airplane cabin: he was leaning against a battered blue minibus at a scenic lookout in South America. Chiriboga was hallooing to his charges and announcing something, something about "mounting our bus." The man who'd been studying the grass or illegal narcotic or whatever it was was stuffing a handful of it and a small magnifying glass into his pants pocket. His tow-haired wife was shoving her binoculars into her bag and heading toward the bus door. As she passed Seibold, pink Kleenex fell at his feet.

The three couples climbed aboard. "After you, Professor," Chiriboga said, removing his Panama hat, bending, and sweeping the hat past his knees in a ridiculous courtier's bow. Seibold stepped up the stairs and sprinted toward the back, fervently hoping Chiriboga would not join him. Chiriboga, however, sat in the passenger's seat closest to the door and began giving the driver instructions in rapid Spanish. With a blast of the horn and a clatter of gravel, the bus rocketed onto the narrow mountain roadway. The tow-haired woman uttered several penetrating shrieks.

Seibold closed his eyes. He was drowsy, rather pleasantly drowsy. Maybe there really was something to the Latin afternoon siesta concept. Except that it wasn't afternoon. It was 11:47 a.m.

He had arrived in Quito on Monday. The flight from Chicago to Panama City was long and uneventful, the airport in Panama City (where he changed planes) what he'd expected: palm trees, bushes with large red flowers. Heat. One hundred percent humidity. He hadn't planned sensibly for his departure and, out of habit, donned a plaid flannel shirt with his Levi's. Within minutes of stepping into the Panamanian airport, he was drenched with sweat, the red and black flannel sticking like gummed paper to his back.

The layover in Panama City lasted two hours. Soon after their departure from Panama, the plane gained considerable altitude. They were skirting high purple mountains veined and capped with snow. He peered from the window and studied the barren landscape below. If human beings inhabited those rocky reaches, it was impossible to tell.

Seibold reclined his seat and reviewed what he learned at MIT about South American continental drift, geological uplift, and volcanism--nothing. He took a brief nap, awoke, and drank two cups of powerful coffee brought by the dark-eyed stewardess. "Only the finest Colombian beans," she said with a heavy accent and lips outlined in scarlet. He asked her if the Andes were the result of uplift as opposed to volcanism. Her gaze dropped toward her breasts, and her voice became husky. "Señor," she said, "I have never heard it called that!"

He removed an old guidebook purchased in a secondhand bookstore From his dirty canvas backpack. The book, published in Ecuador, was bound in stained brown leather and printed on musty yellowed paper. He opened the book, flipped a tissue page facing a blurred engraving of a volcano, and read.

The Republic of Ecuador, the guidebook said, was the smallest of the Andean nations. Ecuador, it said, stretched from the fabled giant tortoises of the Galápagos Islands in the Pacific, across the breath-taking Andes, to the savage Jívaro headhunters of the Oriente. Quito, Ecuador, the guidebook said, was built in the 1500s by brave Spanish conquistadores . Before the Spanish, the mighty Incas ruled the land; before the Incas, others. Most of Ecuador's inhabitants, it said, were jolly peasants.

The book did not explain why a city should have been founded on an Andean plateau two miles high. Indeed, Seibold was considering what human perversity might have prompted anyone to settle at such an altitude when the plane crested a line of snow-covered peaks and plunged thousands of feet. He gasped and dropped the guidebook; his eardrums popped. Wiping his shirt sleeve across his forehead, he peered once more from his window. Strewn across the valley below was a moderate-sized city of narrow streets and white buildings with red tiled roofs. Broad tree-lined boulevards bisected the city. Several buildings were red-tiled squares with open centers, suggesting central courtyards. Plump, squat church steeples, unlike the thin spires of home, rose at intervals. All the buildings looked very white in the sun.

Mr. Nelson Chiriboga had met Seibold at the airport. Chiriboga was a short, grinning gentleman in a rumpled linen suit and gleaming white Panama hat and white shoes. His mustache was thick and black; his unlined toast-colored face gave no clue to his age. He threw out his arms in extravagant welcome--no kissing, thankfully. They exchanged pleasantries: Seibold in Spanish from Lesson One (Greetings) of "The Joy of Spanish"; Chiriboga in correct but convoluted English learned who knew where. Chiriboga complimented Seibold: "Your accent is very, very good, Professor. I myself would have mistaken you for a native." Seibold guessed this was an exaggeration, but a pleasing one, nevertheless: afraid of making a fool of himself, he had labored diligently to reproduce the speaker's words in the tape-recorded lessons.

There had been a considerable delay in the airport's baggage handling department, and some shouting and gesticulating between Chiriboga and a tight-lipped airport official. Eventually a brown porter in a battered fedora and poncho slung Seibold's single suitcase into the trunk of Chiriboga's small gray Ford, and they drove the two-lane highway toward the city center. Chiriboga drove devilishly fast and chain-smoked powerful cigarettes; the fingernails of his right hand were stained yellow. "We are most honored to have you here with us, Professor Say-bold," Chiriboga said, taking his eyes from the road. "This will be a great opportunity for both our students and our esteemed President. We deeply venerate your inestimable. . . ."

Chiriboga chattered in this vein all the way to the hotel, expanding on the glory Seibold was bestowing upon the University, the Government, and their President, interrupting himself only to point out the immense eucalyptus trees lining the road and the imbecility of other drivers. Once inside the city center, Chiriboga deftly maneuvered between buses, fountains, pushcart vendors, and other foolish individuals who believed themselves entitled to some piece of the roadway.

They screeched to a halt in front of a white, three-story wall built along a narrow flagstone sidewalk. Seibold's stomach lurched toward his lungs. "The Hotel Magnífico!" Chiriboga announced with a flourish of his cigarette; ash flew onto his linen suit and the seat.

The Magnífico's three-story façade featured arched windows with iron grillwork and window boxes heaped with red flowers. A little brown boy in shabby clothes and oversized felt hat appeared from behind the hotel's massive front door and jerked open the car door on Seibold's side. Saluting with his left hand, the boy muttered several unintelligible words, then scuttled to Chiriboga's side. Leaving Chiriboga's door ajar, the little boy hurried back to the hotel door. The door was built on the lines of a medieval castle entrance: heavy wooden planks embossed with square nailheads. The door handle was difficult to manipulate and, once the boy opened it, he was only able to keep it open by leaning against it.

Seibold staggered out of the car, past the boy, through the doorway, and into the hotel lobby. He was followed by Chiriboga, who nattered on about the inadequacies of the Magnífico. "Alas," Chiriboga said, "the Atahualpa is experiencing renovation just now. . . ."

The hotel lobby was dazzling, brilliantly lit and smelling of garlic and olive oil. Half blind, Seibold managed to distinguish a registration desk, a few pieces of heavy, dark furniture, and the presence of two huge palms in brass tubs. He looked up. There was no ceiling. Or rather, the ceiling was a skylight three stories above him. Intense tropical sunlight shone on the lobby and the staircases leading to the second and third floors. The staircases were open, revealing numbered doors behind dark, heavily carved balustrades.

He was more than ready to go to his room. According to his calculations, he should suffer no jet lag: Quito shared the same Eastern Time Zone as his home town. His initial investigations of the time zone question had yielded a surprise: he had not known the extent to which South America lay east, not west, of North America. Until he traced his route on a map, he had assumed he would reach Quito by flying west to California, then south toward Mexico City.

While Chiriboga conferred at the registration desk, Seibold ambled over to a battered wooden rack filled with travel brochures and advertisements for local products. He pulled out a flimsy orange pamphlet. "Journey to the Middle of the Earth!" it proclaimed in English; "0 degrees 00 minutes!" Inside, lurid prose and a grainy photograph extolled the virtues of day trips to the Equatorial Monument, an unattractive four-cornered pile of stone. Another picture featured inanely smiling tourists posing in front of the monument, their sneaker-clad feet on either side of a narrow white line. "Two Feet in Two Hemispheres!" the caption read; "Look! NO SHADOWS AT MID-DAY!!!" The back cover declared, "A one-in-a-lifetime opportunity!"

That was ridiculous, of course. The equator ran through the entire upper third of Ecuador plus twenty-four thousand or so more miles around the rest of the globe. There could be millions of such monuments. Why this particular spot. . . .

The registration clerk cleared his throat and spoke. Seibold shoved the pamphlet back in the rack and ambled toward the desk. "I am so sorry, Señor Profesor," the clerk said in Spanish, smiling and shaking his head, his hands raised in a gesture of resignation. "We have no ascensores . It is all these huelgas ."

"Okay," said Seibold, having learned from "The Joy of Spanish" that okay was okay with speakers of Spanish. He did not, however, understand the nouns ascensores and huelgas; hopefully whatever they didn't have wasn't of life-or-death importance, like flush toilets.

The clerk stopped smiling and spoke rapidly to the little boy. Chiriboga handed the boy his car keys, and the boy disappeared through the front door. In a moment the door reopened, and the boy's face and an arm carrying a suitcase appeared. The door slammed, slowly opened again, and Seibold's suitcase appeared in the crack and was shoved through. Clearly the door was too heavy. Why, Seibold wondered, was the boy given such a job when he was obviously unqualified to do it? Neither Chiriboga nor the clerk suggested they help--

"--Because of our approaching lunch hours." There was a spatter of applause. Seibold's eyes flew open. Chiriboga stood at the front of the minibus, clutched the edge of the driver's seat with one hand and gesticulated expansively with the other, making some announcement about their "lunch boxes." Was he trying to say "box lunches"? Chiriboga was grinning particularly broadly, which either meant they would get their food or they wouldn't. Which?

The little Indian boy who carried his suitcase had grinned in the same hopeful way, his brown face grimy under the old fedora. He had worn a long-sleeved white shirt with tattered cuffs, patched blue pants, and no shoes. The bare feet were disconcerting. Someone had told Seibold some Ecuadorians were poor; the boy could be no more than eight or ten years old. He made a mental note: Research Ecuadorian child labor laws.

The boy lugged the suitcase up two long flights of stairs, losing his grip on it every second or third stair and banging it against the treads. Seibold followed him and, in spite of the slow pace behind the boy and the suitcase, arrived at the top of the second staircase gasping. The hotel skylight, balustrades, and doors were in orbit around him. He staggered to the nearest wall, leaned against it, and closed his eyes. I'm going to pass out or throw up, he thought.

"The altitude," he heard Chiriboga's voice say knowingly. The boy asked something about the Señor; Chiriboga answered in soft Spanish.

"But--but what about--" Seibold had stammered, his eyes still closed, gesturing in Chiriboga's direction.

"We are used," said Chiriboga.

"It's--so--damned hard--to--breathe!"

"Mmmm," said Chiriboga. "Not so many oxygen atoms at this altitude."

Seibold had continued to lean against the wall. Someone fit a key into a lock; it rattled like a movie key unlocking a movie dungeon. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. Chiriboga and the boy stood on either side of a large doorway several feet away. They watched him with wide brown eyes and inscrutable expressions.

Seibold had taken a few cautious steps, gripped either side of the doorway to steady himself, and stared into the room. It was a room at least ten times the size of his tiny monastic bedroom at home: a high ceiling, rough whitewashed plaster walls hung with wrought iron sconces holding bare light bulbs, a red tiled floor decorated with a single round white rug, a large brown llama (or alpaca or vicuña--how did you tell the difference?) in the center of the rug, a round table with an immense bouquet of yellow flowers.

He stepped across the threshold. To his left stood a bed. It was an enormous bed, an outrageous four-poster bed with an elaborate carved headboard, a sumptuous red canopy, and red curtains at the four corners. The bed was an embarrassment. It was precisely the kind of bed Seibold had seen in cinematic spectacles like The Scarlet Pimpernel and the Three Musketeers , the kind of bed in which bewigged young men were invariably depicted tugging on bewigged young ladies' corset strings. It was a bed that fairly shouted SEX HAPPENS HERE! Quickly he walked around the foot of the bed, trying to ignore the bed's shiny red coverlet and its overabundance of white pillows edged with lace.

On the other side of the bed was a wardrobe with deeply carved doors and ornate brass handles. Beyond the wardrobe, he saw, was a large white-tiled bathroom with white fixtures: a long, claw-footed tub, a toilet with a wall-mounted tank and pull chain, another porcelain fixture of indeterminate purpose, and a pedestal sink with x-shaped handles. The toilet looked inviting. With a sense of relief he put his hand to his zipper. Chiriboga and the little boy materialized beside him.

"The room is most unworthy, Professor," Chiriboga said, raising his arms in a gesture indicating--unworthiness? "But perhaps it will be satisfactory until you have taken possession of your very pleasing house."

"Yeah," said Seibold, removing his hand from his zipper. He turned and bolted back into the bedroom.

Facing the foot of the bed were French doors leading to a balcony. The doors and the windows were fitted with iron bars--iron bars, although they were on the third floor. He walked over to the doors and found them unlocked; he opened them and stepped onto the balcony. The balcony, bordered in wrought iron grillwork and flower boxes containing red flowers, was just large enough for two chairs. From the balcony he had an excellent view of the street below.

The back wall of the hotel, like the front, was built to the edge of the sidewalk. The sidewalk was too narrow, the street was too narrow, and the street and sidewalk together were choked with pedestrians; red, yellow, and blue compact cars; small trucks; and handcarts. Directly below, a man in a gray felt hat and blue striped poncho pulled a thin rope attached to a donkey.

The noise was ferocious: honking, shouting, a metallic clanking like cooking pots banging together. The smell was nearly as strong: gusts of animal excrement, fruit, and a not unpleasant menthol smell which, oddly, made him think of his mother. His mother. He should phone his mother. Tell her he'd arrived and all that. . . . He would take care of it in the next week or two.

For a moment the chaos on the street ordered itself, and he saw the pavement was made of cobblestones. He'd never seen a real cobblestone street before, only photographs of quaint European towns. This street was different, though, from streets in Rye, England, and Florence, Italy: the cobblestones weren't randomly arranged from one curb to the other, but were set in neat columns separated by narrow stripes of cut stone.

Order reverted to chaos. The honking grew louder. Something was obstructing traffic. Oh--the man and the donkey. The man and the donkey moved with prodigious slowness, the donkey's pack, large enough to be a television set, swayed from side to side. A tiny yellow taxi edged its way through the crowd and pulled up behind the donkey. In the movie version of this scene, Seibold thought, the taxi driver would lower his window and shake his fist at the man and his donkey. To his gratification, the taxi driver lowered his window and shook his fist at the man and the donkey. The man leading the donkey did not look back, but plodded imperturbably on. The taxi driver responded with angry blasts of his horn.

Astonishing: there were still people in the world who used donkeys. His former boss, the Senator, had given many speeches referring to "the obscene squalor of Third World countries." This crowded street and its donkey were obvious examples of that obscene squalor.

Seibold looked to his right, along deep doorways and arched windows in buildings tinged pink by the setting sun. Corrugated metal shutters sealed narrow storefronts; weathered painted signs read Pan Francés, Carnicería, and Supermercado: French Bread, butcher shop, and, ludicrously (he thought) Supermarket. On the roof of a nearby building an immense sparkling bottle of beer poured stars into a glittering glass. He squinted. The bottle, beer, and glass were thousands of tiny mirrored disks, Mylar moths fluttering in the evening breeze.

His eyes continued down the street, distinguishing a dozen cross streets, each intersection a jumble of colorful moving figures uninhibited by traffic lights. Eventually the traffic thinned and the road vanished into a far-off grove of tall trees--more eucalyptus, he guessed. Beyond the trees he saw a mountain, a modest-sized mountain, but a mountain nevertheless, its slopes dark green with emerald and brown patchwork suggesting small farms. Beyond the mountain loomed Andean peaks crowned with red.

He turned, reentered the room, and closed the doors. There was a heavy iron bolt; he threw it. The blood had stopped pounding in his ears. Chiriboga was smoking a cigarette. The little boy was gone.

"Nice room," Seibold said.

He didn't think he was supposed to tip Chiriboga. What next? He stuck his hands in his Levi's pockets and began wandering. On the table against the wall was a magazine entitled ¡Ecuador!; he picked it up and began flipping through its pages. It was printed on newsprint and written in Spanish--he should have guessed from the title's upside-down exclamation mark. Could he make out a few sentences? Yes. That was a Ford ad. They probably didn't manufacture Fords here--almost certainly cars had to be imported. That, obviously, was an ad for mineral water: Agua Güitig. His mother had told him he should drink only mineral water. Mineral water or Cokes. And beer. Plenty of beer ads, beer like the beer advertised on the sign across the street, with good German-sounding names. He might be able to get a decent beer while he was here. "Thanks," he said over his shoulder. He kept reading. This was an article about artistas indígenas. What the hell was an indigenous artist?

"I will be delighted," Chiriboga said abruptly, "to stay with you or leave, as you wish. The dining room here is excellent. They are famous for their ceviche and their lechón hornado , two of our most famous Ecuadorian dishes. Of course, your every expense is taken care of by our government. You have only to add it to your account."

"Stay or go. Whatever you want," Seibold had said with a shrug, hoping Chiriboga would leave.

Now, as he rode with the McCreadie Fellows in the shabby blue minibus to the site where they would experience their "lunch boxes," Seibold remembered what happened next. Chiriboga had walked toward him and stood uncomfortably close, so close Seibold could smell the cigarette smoke in the man's clothes and his floral aftershave. "With your gracious permission, I will depart," Chiriboga had said. He had put his cigarette between his lips, reached into a breast pocket of his suit coat, and drawn out a fat white envelope. "Here is money for necessaries while we await the deposit of payments into your banking account," he said, handing Seibold the envelope.

Seibold had known nothing about the rate of exchange and wondered if Ecuadorian currency was like Italian currency: thick stacks of bills signifying next to nothing. He had put the envelope and the magazine ¡Ecuador! on the table, beside the vase of yellow flowers, and taken two steps backward.

"Now you will be able to rest from your journeys," Chiriboga had said, moving two steps closer. "Our McCreadie Fellows have been here already three weeks. Two days after tomorrow it will be my pleasure to offer them a guided day trip of our neighboring environs and our famous Mt. Cotopaxi. You would be most welcome."

Seibold had taken two more steps back. What was it with Chiriboga? Why didn't he keep his distance? Seibold had wanted to tell him to back off, to refuse the proffered tour; to order dinner, go to bed, and strike out the next morning on his own. Then something occurred to him. If he really was going to orchestrate a presidential campaign, he should get to know the country. He'd skimmed the musty old guidebook, but he should see the place. It was certainly what he made his political clients to do. "Get out in the hustings," he ordered them. "Meet your voters."

Chiriboga had taken two further steps toward Seibold.

"Sure," Seibold had said, backing into the crimson bed. He had dropped onto it and sunk ominously towards the floor. "When's the tour?"

"Thursday," Chiriboga had said. "Our bus will gather you here at eight o'clock on the morning of Thursday. My staff will provide a most excellent, ummm, picnic . I have also taken the liberty of accepting an appointment for you on Friday."

Seibold, suddenly aware of a weariness from his day's exertions, had glared up at Chiriboga. "I, and only I, take care of my appointments," he said sternly. Best to let the man know where he stood. He tried to hoist himself off the bed, the better to deliver his ultimatum. Rising from the sagging bed proved difficult, however, requiring several clumsy attempts and some entanglement in the crimson bed hangings. He undoubtedly looked foolish. He hated looking foolish. His whole life he had avoided looking foolish at all costs.

"Yes, yes," Chiriboga had replied, black eyes glinting, grinning his broad grin and slowly smoothing the left, then the right, side of his caterpillar mustache with nicotine-stained fingers. "I apologize for any distress. But in this case, there is no choice."

Once on his feet, Seibold stood a good head taller than Chiriboga. Seasoned by the hordes of seedy brochure vendors and pestilential billboard salesmen with whom he had dealt in his short life, he unwittingly assumed the dreaded Voice Imperial. "There's always a choice," he said sternly.

"I am so sorry," Chiriboga had said, sounding not the least bit sorry. "But when our President makes an appointment, no one of us refuses."

Seibold had thought about that for a second. "You're right," he said. "I never refuse a President."