"Golconda may seem beautiful to you, but it's spoiled by tourism. I found a more beautiful place farther on. I had to hack my way to it. I have a beach where the sand is so white it hurts the eyes like a snow slope. I'm building a house. I come to Golconda once a week to shop. I have a jeep. If you like you can drive out with me for a visit. Unless, like most Americans, you have come here to drink and dance..."

"I'm not free to drink and dance. I have to play every night with the jazz orchestra."

"Then you must be Lillian Beye," said the passenger who had not yet spoken. He was a tall blond Austrian who spoke a harsh Spanish but with authority. "I'm the owner of the Black Pearl. I engaged you."

"Mr. Hansen?"

He shook her hand without smiling. He was fair-skinned.

The tropics had not been able to warm him or to melt the icicle-blue eyes.

Lillian felt that these three men were somehow interfering with her own tasting of Golconda. They seemed intent on giving her an image of Golconda she did not want. The Doctor wanted her to notice only that the children were in need of care, the American wanted her to recoil from tourism, and the owner of the Black Pearl made the place seem like a night club.

The taxi stopped for gasoline. An enormously fat American, unshaved for many days, rose from a hammock to wait on them.

"Hello, Sam," said Doctor Hernandez. "How is Maria? You didn't bring her to me for her injection."

Sam shouted to a woman dimly visible inside the palmleaf shack. She came to the door. Her long black shawl was fastened to her shoulders and her baby was cradled in the folds of it as if inside a hammock.

Sam repeated the Doctor's question. She shrugged her shoulders: "No time," she said and called: "Maria!"

Maria came forward from a group of children, carrying a boat made out of a coconut shell. She was small for her age, delicately molded, like a miniature child, as Mexican children often are. In the eyes of most Mexican painters, these finely chiseled beings with small hands and feet and slender necks and waists become larger than nature, with the sinews and muscles of giants. Lillian saw them tender and fragile and neat. The Doctor saw them ill.

The engineer said to Lillian: "Sam was sent here twenty years ago to build bridges and roads. He married a native. He does nothing but sleep and drink."

"It's the tropics," said Hansen.

"You've never been to the Bowery," said Lillian.

"But in the tropics all white men fall apart."

"I've heard that but I never believed it. Any more than I believe all adventurers are doomed. I think such beliefs are merely an expression of fear, fear of expatriation, fear of adventure."