Jack and the girl had been captivated at once by the metal arch, whose elegant silhouette, rising 192 metres in the air, cut off a vast portion of the sky above the houses; they had spotted it from far away because it was made of stainless steel and gleamed in the sun.

They walked around for a while in the part of town next to the old Court House and Busch Memorial Stadium, then came back to the parking lot. They had not found answers to their questions, but at least they had reached a decision: as their stay in St. Louis seemed likely to be long and as they must start cutting back on expenses, they would stay in the parking lot rather than take a hotel room or look for a campsite; La Grande Sauterelle undertook to obtain permission from the young man who, working from a booth with a wicket in it, served as the parking lot attendant.

The next day, Jack placed an ad in the city’s two leading newspapers, giving a telephone number for Théo to call if he wanted to contact him: the number was that of the parking lot booth. And then they waited to hear from him. Beneath the metal arch, they visited an underground museum devoted to the conquest of the West: the Museum of Westward Expansion. In their different ways, both the man and the girl were crazy about museums and had seen all sorts, but the Museum of Westward Expansion was without a doubt the most fascinating, most amazing one they’d ever seen. In the 1840s, St. Louis had been a meeting place for people who had heard that in the West, on the Pacific coast, the land was vast and fertile; they had sold all their possessions, bought oxen, covered wagons and provisions for six months, then joined a caravan that would cross the desert, ford rivers, scale mountains, brave foul weather, disease and sometimes Indians, until finally, after a five-thousand kilometre journey, they reached the Promised Land. The route taken by these wagon trains was called the Oregon Trail, and one of the starting points was St. Louis; in fact, the metal arch testified to the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century, the city had been the Gateway to the West.

Jack and La Grande Sauterelle spent long hours in the underground museum. Then one day something happened to the man. As he was coming out of the museum, a wave of memories broke over him unexpectedly. The man’s memories weren’t original; they were even very ordinary, like those of everybody else — a woman who goes off with another man, a crumbling self-image, some lost illusions — but at times they came back so forcefully that he was overwhelmed. That was what happened on the day in question, and he put on his unhappy expression and withdrew into himself. He saw the dark side of everything.

He tried to read a book about the Mississippi that La Grande Sauterelle had “borrowed” from the museum bookstore. It was Explorers of the Mississippi, by Timothy Severin. The Spaniard Hernando de Soto was the first white man to see the Mississippi; a bloodthirsty brute, he had come from the south and killed almost all the Indians he encountered along the way. It could be said that Louis Jolliet and Père Marquette had behaved fairly well except that, like everybody in those days, they considered Indians to be inferior beings. Robert Cavelier de La Salle was a great explorer and a great visionary, but his story was a series of murders and betrayals, and he himself had been murdered in Texas, in 1687; his lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, imposed his authority on the Indians by striking them in the face with his famous iron hand.