Finally I left in the hours just before dawn, picking up the main highway north from Bangkok. The first stretch of road was broad and flat, with endless stretches of rice fields on either side. The road was built up high because during the rainy season the lands were frequently under water. Even with the height of the road it was occasionally impassable.

When the road got worse, I began to go into my act. I stopped in the small villages and bought my meals from the people, bartering silver coins for crudely spiced bowls of rice and meat. My equipment drew considerable interest, and the villagers were amused that someone would be foolish enough to spend time and money pursuing the pretty little butterflies. I redeemed myself in their eyes by explaining that I sold the insects at a handsome profit to rich collectors – thus it was these rich collectors who were the fools, and I was merely a shrewd tradesman. I would sit cross-legged around village campfires and show the tools of my trade and pass around the half-dozen mounted butterflies for everyone’s rapt inspection. I hadn’t yet bothered catching any butterflies of my own.

It was at one of these villages, far north of Bangkok, where the rice fields were more and more frequently giving way to stretches of bamboo forest and stands of teak, and where a few coins had bought me a water buffalo steak pounded by hand and rubbed with ginger and broiled over a wood fire, with a spicy root wine to wash it down, that I first began to feel genuinely at ease. In the distance were the noises of the nighttime wilderness – monkeys chattering in the trees, the far-off growl of a jungle cat after its prey, the hooting of an owl. And all around me were the soft voices of the local peasantry, its country’s pride, according to Goldsmith, which when once destroyed can never be supplied.

Here the soft voices spoke Siamese. But for the language and the food I could have been almost anywhere – on a hill in Macedonia where my son, Todor, lived, alongside a jungle stream in the Amazon Basin, in a green valley in Slovenia, anywhere. Here Bangkok and Manhattan were equally far removed, light-centuries away. Here people grew their own food and slaughtered their own animals and built their own huts and made their own music and drew their own pictures. Here there were no newspapers, no radios, no jukeboxes, no air conditioning, no central heating, no deodorants, none of the conveniences of modern civilization.

And here, too, I had my first word of Tuppence. Why, yes, an old woman told me, she had seen some people with black skins, a woman and some men as well. It was remarkable, she had not known there were persons in the world of such a color. They had passed through the village a day after Prang’s buffalo had calved, just nine days ago.

They were with the bandits, a man added. But he did not think they were of the bandits but were perhaps their prisoners.

“Bandits? Were they Communists?”

“What are Communists?”

I took a different tack. “How did you know that the captors of the black persons were bandits?”

“They took food,” the old woman said, “and did not pay for it, and pointed guns at us. Since they did not have uniforms, we knew they were not of the government, so they must be bandits.”

“Do bandits come here often?”

“Not too often. Farther north there are more bandits, and they are cruel to the villagers. But here only once in a great while do the bandits come to steal from us, and from time to time the soldiers of the government come north looking for bandits, and they too steal from us. But for the most part we are left alone, safe from soldiers and bandits, and we prosper.”

I learned more of the bandits as I moved to the north. There were many groups of them, I was told, and sometimes they fought among themselves and other times they battled the government forces. The bandits hated the government, I learned, and the government had vowed to exterminate the bandits, and it was the peasants who suffered most, as is usually the case. Often the bandits would raid a village and behead the chief of the village and force the young men to go off with them. And if a village chieftain cooperated with the bandits, then the government troops might raid the village and take the young men off to join the army, and the chieftain who had cooperated with the bandits would be shot by an army firing squad. The government had announced that some day all the bandits would be dead, and the bandits had announced that the government would be destroyed and the land would belong to the people, and the villagers sincerely hoped that someday all of the soldiers and all of the bandits would succeed in killing one another.

I heard scattered reports of Tuppence, nothing too certain but bits and pieces picked up here and there. I left the main road and took a road that was not main at all, and only the engineering marvel that was the Land Rover enabled me to keep on going.

Until at last one fine day I emerged in a clearing and suddenly found the Land Rover utterly surrounded by armed men. They were not in uniforms, so I knew they were not government soldiers and guessed that I had found some bandits.

I spoke to them in Siamese; I spoke to them in Khmer. They did not answer. And the next thing I knew I had been stripped naked, divested of clothing and socks and shoes and money belt, and tucked unceremoniously into that horrible bamboo cage.

Now, according to the only bandit who had deigned to talk to me, they were finally ready to kill me.

Chapter 6

The forest began to come awake about half an hour before sunrise. The sky turned from black to gray, and early birds set off in full-throated pursuit of early worms. I crouched in my bamboo home and waited for the bandit camp to wake up. I was beset by the sort of nervous impatience of a toothache victim in a dentist’s waiting room, anxious to relieve one pain but a little apprehensive of a greater agony.

They planned to sever my head from my body. I wondered if my head would talk to them after it had been removed – there were cases like that on record, a sort of switch on decapitated chickens racing around barnyards. I seemed to recall that a saint had done something of the sort, blessing those who had effected his martyrdom. I did not expect to bless anyone.

The sun rose, and the little camp came awake. I wondered if Dhang had been able to carry out the final tasks I had assigned to him. I had not seen him in over an hour. He had performed well enough as far as I knew, managing to fetch things from the Land Rover. I now shared my cage with a jar of acid from the car’s battery, the insect-killing jar, and a short black bayonet liberated from a sleeping guerrilla. I would have preferred one of their machine pistols, but Dhang had not been able to get one for me; I don’t think it would have fit through the bottom of the cage, anyway. I looked at the bayonet, the killing jar, the acid. Then I closed my eyes. One had to work with the materials at hand, but it certainly would have helped to have some more impressive materials available.

A voice rose above the hubbub of the camp and began issuing commands. I watched through the side of the cage as a barefoot young man climbed furiously up the tree from which my cage was suspended. He walked up the trunk as easily as if it had been lying extended upon the ground, then swung out upon the branch. His weight bowed the branch, and the cage dipped toward the ground. Guerrillas moved to surround it. The Thai up in the tree cut the rope, and ten pairs of hands gripped the cage and lowered it gently to the ground.

Another command. Hands unhooked the top of the cage and lifted it up and off. I scooped up the bayonet, the killing jar, and the acid. I got to my feet for the first time since I had first been placed in that unholy prison. My captors gathered around, peering at me over the sides of the cage. They seemed astonished that I had any possessions with me, and one, evidently the commander, demanded to know what these things were that I held.