The Doctor's thoughts had also been wandering through other places. Mexico City, where his wife was? His three small children? His past? His medical studies in Paris and in New York? His first book of poems, published when he was twenty years old?

Lillian smiled at him as if saying, you too have taken a secret journey into the past.

Simultaneously they returned to the present.

Lillian said: "There is a quality in this place which does not come altogether from its beauty. What is it? Is it the softness which annihilates all thought and lulls the body for enjoyment? Is it the continuity of music which prevents thoughts from arresting the flow of life? I have seen other trees, other rivers; they did not have the power to intoxicate the senses. Do you feel this? Does everyone feel this? Is this what kept South Seas travelers from ever returning home?"

"It does not affect everyone in the same way," said the Doctor with bitterness in his voice, and Lillian realized he was thinking of his wife.

Was this the mystery in Doctor Hernandez's life? A wife he could not win over to the city he liked, the life he loved?

She waited for him to say more. But he was silent, and his face had become placid again.

Her hand, which she had left in the waters of the lagoon to feel the gliding, the uninterrupted gentleness of the flowing, to assure herself of this union with a living current, she now felt she must lift, to prove to the Doctor that she shared his anxiety, and that his sadness affected her. She must surrender the pleasure of touching the flow of water, as if she were touching the flow of life within her, out of sympathy for his anguish.

As she lifted her hand and waited for the drops of water to finish dripping from it, a shot was heard, and water spattered over her. They all three sat still, stunned.

"Hunters?" she asked. She wanted to stand up and shout and wave so the hunters would know they were there.

The Doctor answered quietly: "They were not hunters. It was not a mistake. They intended to shoot me, but they missed."

"But why? Why? You're the most needed, the most loved man here!"

"I refuse to give them drugs. Don't you understand? As a doctor I have access to drugs. They want to force me to give them some. Drugs for forgetting. And I have no right to do this, no right except in cases of great physical pain. That's why when you compared Golconda to a drug I felt bitter. For some people, Golconda is not enough."

The fisherman did not understand their talk in English. He said in Spanish, with a resigned air: "Bad hunters. They missed the crocodile. I could catch him with my bare hands and a knife. I often have. Without guns. What bad hunters!"