- Chapter 26 - end - Page 231

     “Shut up,” said Baldomero Capas. With contemptuous care he slid the passport and papers into my shirt pocket.

     They walked out of the barrio and marched me with them. We headed east, into a cane field, toward the mountains. The stalks weren't as high here as on the other side, and I bent to keep them out of my eyes. We left the field, crossed a freshet, and entered another field. That one stopped at the foot of a bluff hillside, and when we got to the top, the mountains were directly ahead of us, dipping in and out of clouds that obscured a rising moon.

     Twice we climbed high scrub-covered ridges, twice dropped down into valleys where terraced paddies mirrored the moon. There was no more cane. In the second valley, we didn't climb straight out, but followed a stream that rose gradually, the valley pinching in around us, flocked in high, dense trees that formed a canopy overhead, real jungle.

     We came out on a clearing fringed by cogon grass. Beyond the clearing was a stand of rattan and more jungle, billowing foliage. We were almost across before I saw that we weren't walking into just grass and trees. An unkempt flourish of brush became a thatched shelter. A lodge of bamboo materialized out of the rattan. Boys with rifles stepped out of the cogon's pale stalks and white tufts. I glimpsed barbed wire strung on posts. Sentries, a lookout tower of coco logs, slit trenches.

     They took me through a break in the wire, to a dugout with a canvas roof. They pushed me inside without loosening the rope at my wrists.

     Inside, darkness was heavy. The floor was mud. The walls were rough-sawn planks up to ground level, topped with courses of sandbags.

     I picked myself out of the mud. I saw that I wasn't alone. Another man crouched in one corner. I went to the