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right, Lewis?”
    “Afterwards,” Moon said.
    T HE Gran Hotel Dolores was a structure of twelve rooms; except for the church and mission of the Iglesia de la Virgen, it was the largest building in the settlement, and the only one besides the sawmill which was roofed with tin instead of thatch. The hotel had been erected in the great era of the rubber boom, in anticipation of a prosperity that came but did not remain; it gave shelter to transient timbermen and plantation
patrones
, to explorers investigating the wild tribes and rivers of Oriente State, and to missionaries, as well as to such rare visitors as the state’s political representatives in the capital.
    The hotel bar, which occupied one flank of the whitewashed lobby—dining-room—salon, was the center of Madre de Dios, for the rest of the settlement, unequipped with generators, was plunged into darkness by the jungle night. Hence the people were drawn like insects to its light. Those with money and those who had spent money at the Gran Hotel in the recent past congregated inside, while the rest gathered on the sidewalks, content with the glow from the large windows in the white plaster wall. Here, as the evening passed, they might speak softly or sing; the townsmen at the tables inside sang rarely and spoke loudly. Having neither glass nor screen but only large wooden shutters to be closed in time of storm, the windows were used periodically for sudden entry and exit. The bar was located on a corner, and since its two doorways serviced each of the only two streets in town, the clientele commanded a view of almost everything of importance that took place in Madre de Dios.
    A further attraction of the Gran Hotel was a radio that played full blast all day and night, as if—since all jungle radios were overpriced—its listeners were entitled at the very least to all the volume it was able to deliver. The radios were cheaply made, and since it was never certain that, once silenced, one would ever speak again, and since there was no one for two hundred miles who could repair it, the usual practice was to turn it on immediately upon purchase and leave it on for the rest of its natural life. Once dead, it remained in its place of honor forever: a mute radio, all set about with Spanish doilies, artificial flowers and a hand-tinted portrait of the Virgin Mary, was in Madre de Dios a symbol of prestige. Behind the bar of the Gran Hotel two dead radios flanked the live one.
    These were but a few of the unusual features which made the bar of the Gran Hotel Dolores the heart of this jungle capital, and it was to this place that there came each night, in a private car with a soldier-driver, its proud owner, El Comandante Rufino Guzmán. Since no road in Madre de Dios went farther than the airstrip, the car, brought in by lumber raft, was used almost exclusively to conduct El Comandante between his house at the army post and the hotel. El Comandante invariably sat himself behind a table in the corner, opposite both doors and beneath the enormous fan. Here his townsmen could come to him as to the Judgment Seat, and here he could witness and preside over almost everything that took place, not only in the bar itself, but in his entire kingdom.
    On this February evening one of the two Americans who had sat down with Guzmán stood up almost immediately and walked about the room; he returned to the table but did not sit down again. In the two weeks since their arrival in Madre de Dios, Moon and Wolfie had put on a bold face, ordering the best that the Gran Hotel Dolores had to offer, but the Comandante had not been taken in, and now he was baiting them at his leisure. Collecting their passports that first day, he had grinned in a way that had alerted them to the dimension of their predicament, saying, “Of course the
señores pilotos
are very welcome in my humble city; it is only a formality, and soon the
pasaportes
will be returned.” Wolfie, thinking to put this greaser at