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.”

  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.

  I heard scattered reports of Tuppence, nothing too certain but bits and pieces picked up here and there. I left the main road 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 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.

  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.

  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, 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.

  A voice rose above the hubbub of the camp and began issuing commands. I watched as a barefoot young man climbed furiously up the tree from which my cage was suspended. 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.

  “What have you? How did you get those things?”

  “It is a magic trick,” I said. “I am a worker of magic and would provide you with entertainment.”

  Some of the younger guerrillas began to chatter excitedly. The camp wasn’t exactly a major draw on the Orpheum Circuit, entertainment of any sort rare.

  But the leader wasn’t having any. “A bayonet,” he said. “Where did you get that?”

  “By a magic entreaty to my gods.”

  “Give me the bayonet.”

  I looked at him and at the bayonet and wanted to give it to him between the eyes. I glanced past the bunch of guerrillas clustered around me and caught sight of Dhang hovering beside one of the huts. He smiled tentatively and made a sign with his hand to indicate that everything was all right. I was glad he thought so.

  “Come out of the cage.”

  I couldn’t climb over the four-foot cage side without spilling the acid. I gave the killing jar to one of the guerrillas and the jar of acid to another, asked them to hold my magic goods for a moment, and then vaulted the side of the cage. I reclaimed the two jars and began babbling about my prowess as a conjurer and sorcerer. The chief remained unimpressed, but I was earning points with the younger element.

  In the center of the camp was a broad section of tree scarred with ax marks and stained with blood. Beside it stood a fat man stripped to the waist, with a massive ax in his hand.

  “Go that way,” the chief said, pointing at the man, the axe, the chopping block.

  “Sacred Leader,” I intoned. I bowed my head. “Sacred Leader, you have determined to put me to death. I beg one last request to entertain you with magical visions. If my entertainment does not please you, then I will go willingly to my death.”

  “It is an imperialist trick.”

  “But will you not observe it, O Leader?”

  He truly was interested in nothing but seeing my head say goodbye to my body, but the group pressured him into it. He stepped back, sighed, and ordered me to get this foolishness over with as quickly as possible. I knelt and unscrewed the cover of the cyanide jar. I took a deep breath.

  “Come close,” I commanded. “Gather around and breathe deeply of the perfumes of life.”

  They gathered around. I let them come as close as they could, and I took a deep breath of my own and held it, and then I poured the cyanide crystals into the jar of battery acid.

  I held my breath.

  They didn’t.

  And at that happy moment, just as a dozen of them breathed deeply of the sweet perfume of bitter almonds, Dhang picked up his cue. All at once half a dozen huts burst into flame as the gasoline did its work. Blue-faced guerrillas dropped around me, their lungs filled with cyanide gas. The chieftain spun around to look at the burning huts, turned again to look at his men falling like flies. He grabbed at his pistol. I kicked him in the stomach and chopped at the side of his neck and took the pistol away from him.

  Across the way a young guerrilla fired at me with a rifle. I saw Dhang loop the butterfly net around his head and knock him off balance. Another man, cursing hysterically, approached Dhang with a machete. I cut him down with a burst from the machine pistol, then spun around to spray a burst of shots at another batch of little men. The pistol was a jerry-built affair; after I’d fired the second burst, it was too hot to hold on to. I threw it aside and snatched up a machete.

  The fat man, the executioner, came at me with his axe. He swung and missed, and I flailed at him with the machete. It sliced halfway through his throat.

  It’s hard to say just what happened after that. Dhang was off to one side, taking potshots at his erstwhile comrades with the rifle. I was in the middle of everything, swinging the machete at anyone who got particularly close to me. Around us the fire had spread to all of the huts. Evidently one of the huts was used to store explosives, and when the fire reached it, everything went off at once. That did it, as far as the remaining guerrillas were concerned. They scattered like dandelion seeds in a hurricane, racing through the circle of fire and out into the jungle.

  I went to Dhang. He clapped his hands jubilantly. “We have destroyed them,” he shouted. “Like a thunderbolt from the heavens we have destroyed them, and I shall have a woman.

  “We’d better get out of here,” I said. “I’ll need some clothing. Shoes, anyway. And I can wrap up in a panung, I suppose.” I didn’t especially want to strip corpses to get my own clothes back. I took a panung from one of the cyanosed guerrillas and wrapped it around my body, tucking the ends into place. I did manage to find a pair of my own shoes and put them on.

  “We will go to the south now?”

  “No,” I told Dhang. “To the north.”

  “The north? But more bandits wait in the north. Why shall we go to the north?”

  “There is a woman there, and—”

  “Ah, that is different,” he said. “If there is a woman there, then that is where we shall go.”

  IT WAS late It was late afternoon. We had been walking for what seemed like forever, and were making very little discernible progress. We would have made considerably less progress if Dhang had not saved me from falling into a leopard trap.

  We were reasonably well equipped for a trek through the jungle. From the guerrilla camp Dhang and I had each taken a machete and a canteen of water. He had a rifle and I had a machine pistol with a full clip in it. The useless Land Rover had yielded up a few treasures, including my flashlight, which the guerrillas had discarded when it failed to operate.

  The first night, Dhang shot three small animals and skinned them while I got a fire going. The creatures were built somewhat like rabbits but had small ears and less powerful hind legs. Dhang hacked them into pieces the size of chicken legs, and we cut green sticks from a tree and roasted the meat en brochette. We demolished all three.

  “We must keep the fire burning all night,” he said. “It will keep animals away, and bad spirits.”

  “Can’t we go any further tonight?”

  “It is not good to travel at night. Evil spirits abound. And leopards, which hunt at night. At night the wise man stays in his hut. We have no hut, Heaven (he always had trouble pronouncing my name), so we remain by our fire. Here.”

  “What’s this?”

  “Betel. Chew it, and your sleep will be better.”

  I thought for a moment. Among its other properties, betel nut contains some substance with a mild narcotic effect, and it occurred to me that such an effect might be a help through the long night. Then, too, there was the When-in-Rome aspect

  Beside me Dhang chewed solemnly on another piece of betel, sighed, spat, closed his eyes. “Soon we will reach the village,” he said.

  “The village?”

  “Tomorrow or the day after. A village in the north country where they may know of your friends. It is not a camp of bandits but a village that lives at peace. The young men from the village join the bandits, but the others are not molested.”

  “Why did you join the guerrillas, Dhang?”

  He looked intently at me, then arced a stream of red saliva at the fire.

  “There was nothing of interest in my village. They said that if I went with them, I would be issued a rifle. I had never had a rifle and could not get one in my village.” Chew. “I thought perhaps”—spit—“that there might be women. My village was small, and of the women in it many were my cousins and sisters. I have never had a woman. Never. I thought perhaps with the bandits—but no, nothing. It was very disturbing.”

  Dhang sighed, spat out his piece of betel, stretched out on his back, and closed his eyes. I lay down on my side and went on chewing betel nut. My mind wandered, and time slipped gently by, and I chewed and spat and chewed and spat, and waited for the sun to rise and for Dhang to wake up.

  We made fairly good time the next day. By midafternoon we reached a large clearing in the jungle, the village Dhang had told me about. Some forty huts were pitched around the perimeter of the clearing. The village came to life at our appearance, with men emerging from the huts, most of them armed with spears or machetes.

  Siamese was not spoken here. Dhang talked with one of the village leaders in a dialect of Khmer. I could not follow the conversation completely but managed to catch the gist of it. Dhang explained that we came in peace, that we were not bandits, that we had destroyed a bandit camp to the south and were forced to flee for our lives. This won us a good deal of sympathy. He went on to tell how we were attempting to rescue some black persons who had been recently captured by the bandits.

  The chieftain clucked over this and said that he had heard of the black persons and had not believed that they existed. He had never known that there were black persons. He had heard of them only recently and he would be glad to summon the villagers together to find out what was known about them. But in the meantime he suggested we relax and sample the hospitality his humble village could provide. It was to be an evening of feasting; they had slaughtered a calf to celebrate the first night of the Week of Tears and Sighs, which commemorated the death by fire of the infant sons and daughters of the gods. It would honor them that we might participate in their celebration.

  “Feasting,” Dhang said, translating for me. “And women, one can see that this village overflows with women. Look at that one!”

  He pointed at a plump young girl, perhaps sixteen years old, her panung covering her primly from her ankles to her waist, her lovely yellow-brown breasts peering out between silky strands of jet black hair. She looked our way, stared, then giggled musically and ran away. For a moment I thought Dhang might run after her, but he somehow managed to control himself.

  For the remainder of the afternoon we had the run of the village. I exchanged my panung, which had grown rather filthy, for a clean one. A villager admired my American shoes. After a couple days of walking sockless through the jungle my own admiration for the shoes was considerably qualified, and I was happy to exchange them for a pair of open sandals. I knew enough Khmer to carry on rudimentary conversations as I wandered around asking about black persons.

  NO ONE had the whole story on Tuppence and the quartet. No one had actually sighted them, but various villagers had been subjected to various rumors from men of other villages and other tribes. The result of collating different bits of data was something like this:

  Four black men and one black girl had been held captive by a band of notorious bandits. The bandits were not of this immediate region, but had come from the northwest, evidently in Laos.

  Curiouser and curiouser, I thought. A kidnapping by Thai guerrillas made a certain amount of sense; Tuppence and the musicians could be used as pawns in some maneuvering between the guerrillas and the Bangkok regime. But why would the Laotians be interested in snatching them?

  I was still puzzling it out when the feast began. The slaughtered calf was run through with a spit and roasted over a roaring fire in the center of the clearing. The entire population of the village sat in a circle around the fire. As guests of honor, Dhang and I received one eye and half of the calf’s brains, along with a couple of rice cakes and some vegetable stew. I ate everything that was given to me, as a proper guest of honor should, and at the conclusion of the meal I wandered off into the jungle, far out of hearing range, and spent some twenty minutes vomiting.

  I returned to the village. Dhang had gone off with the first girl he had pointed out, the plump little topless one. I saw the two of them in the doorway of one of the huts.

  “You and I,” he said in Khmer. He cupped her breast, kissed her mouth. She seemed puzzled. He undid her panung and pulled it off, divested himself of his own panung and rolled on top of her. She rolled out from under him and screamed—and all hell broke loose.

  The elders of the village immediately surrounded him. The girl was led away by an old woman, and the men pointed their spears at Dhang and seemed prepared to kill him at once. I ran through the crowd to his side.

  “So this is how you repay hospitality,” the old chief said scornfully. “You gorge yourself upon eyes and brains and do thus in return.”

  Dhang was babbling that he had never had a girl and would die if he did not get one soon. It looked as though he might die regardless. All around us voices rose up in anger. I tried to get through to the chief, but I had trouble making out what he was saying.

  It was Dhang who explained it to me. After they had sent us on our way, after they had taken us to the edge of the clearing and ordered us to walk into the night, Dhang translated it all for me.

  “It is not permitted,” he said. “Throughout the entire Week of Tears and Sighs sexual relations of any sort are forbidden under penalty of death. If we had come at any other time, we could have had any woman in the village. Any one at all, we would have only to choose. Any one of them—”

  His voice broke. We walked through utter darkness in utter silence…

  CROSSING the border from Thailand to Laos is about as awe-inspiring as crossing from Connecticut to Rhode Island. When you go into Rhode Island at least there’s a sign that welcomes you to the state and tells you what the speed limit is and all the terrible things that will happen to you if you exceed it.

  None of these formalities are observed when you sneak across from Thailand to Laos. That morning we were in Thailand and that afternoon we were in Laos, and somewhere along the way there had been a border that we had crossed.

  We had come a long way, Dhang and I, and it had been an equally frustrating journey for both of us, albeit for different reasons. Dhang was still a virgin, and I was still uncertain as to Tuppence’s whereabouts, or whether she was alive or dead.

  We had made progress of a sort. We had moved from a portion of Thailand that was vaguely and ineffectually dominated by vaguely Communist-oriented guerrillas to a portion of Laos that was quite thoroughly controlled by the forces of the Communist Pathet Lao. We had, in other words, successfully worked our way out of the frying pan and into the fire.

  The jungle thinned out and gave way to level land with a scattering of trees here and there. At a river bank we stopped to drink and wash ourselves. A stranger looked back at me from the water’s surface. I had not shaved since leaving Bangkok, and my beard was thick and wild. The sun had done a good job on the unbearded portions of my face, and the betel nuts that I had been chewing more and more frequently of late had turned my teeth quite black.

  We pressed onward across the plateau and into the craggy, mountainous country. The path widened into a rude sort of road, and a few miles further on, the road was paved after a fashion with loose gravel. We stopped at a roadside hut to ask directions to the nearest town. The woman who answered our knock looked at our weapons and my beard and shrank in terror. Dhang explained calmly that we came in peace, that we were holy men, that we wished to know the route to the nearest town. She told us haltingly to follow the road for about an hour’s time to the city of Tao Dan.

  We walked for what seemed like a good deal more than an hour until, from the top of a hill, we saw the town of Tao Dan in the distance. It was a fairly sizable city, a great change from the hut-encircled jungle villages we had passed through. A town of that size meant policemen and sundry officials, which in turn meant that I would draw an uncomfortable amount of attention. It was unsafe to go there, but at the same time the town seemed the most logical place to get word of Tuppence.

  We walked about halfway there. Then I took Dhang by the arm. “Leave your weapons with me,” I told him. “I’ll wait out of sight in the brush. Go to the town and make inquiries. Say merely that you are a Thai and have made a journey from the west. Say that you have heard that black men and a black woman were to be seen in the area and see what you can find out about them.”

  “And you will wait here?”

  “Yes. Find out as much as you can, then come back here. Try to obtain clothing for yourself, and for me if it is possible. At night, when all is dark, then we will both be able to pass safely through the town.”