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crisp-brimmed Panama hat like the one he had just bought, were haggling over trinkets at a stall. The sight of these people drove them from the market, and yet they saw others from the plane in the museum and in the Indian market and in the narrow streets of Old Town.
    What was the point in coming this distance if all you achieved was that disgusting flight and the company of these timid adventurers? Steadman felt he had so far accomplished nothing. They were stepping over beggars, entering the church of La Merced, their original destination—lots of Todos los Santos activity here, in the shape of reverential women carrying lighted candles or slender flaming tapers.
    The large soot-darkened paintings in La Merced depicted soldiers in armor and settlers in flowerpot hats, the history of the country from the Spanish point of view, unintentionally showing plunder and bamboozling priests and grateful baffled Indians. In one painting a blind priest was being led by a young boy acolyte, Jesus smiling down from the heavens. The text under it read:
    Â 
A los ciegos tit siempre iluminaste,

Testigo el sacerdote que curaste.
    Â 
    â€œâ€˜You always illuminate the blind—witness the priest who’s cured,’” Ava said, translating. “But it rhymes in the original.”
    The tall gold altar was as high as the church ceiling, with tiers of twisted columns, all thick pasty gilt and dazzling gems. A gigantic fatuity, this jewel box, looming among ragged people, some of them prostrate, others on their knees.
    â€œBut I had a strange encounter this morning at the hotel,” Ava said. She kept walking, did not look back, slipped into a pew at the side of the church.
    Steadman followed her. He sat and listened to her describe how she had taken her clothes off and a man had come from behind and slipped a mask over her face; how he had made love to her; how it had happened in silence—she told Steadman in an even voice, as though confiding to a stranger.
    â€œYou liked it,” he said.
    â€œI’ve never done anything like that before,” she said.
    He wanted her again, and seeing a masked woman pass up the aisle and drop to her knees, a supplicant at a side chapel, only aroused him more.
    The masked woman was praying, her words remorseful and audible: “
Perdona nuestras ofensas como también perdonamos a los que nos ofenden—no nos dejes caer en la tentación
...”
    â€œTell me,” he said, his tongue thick with desire.
    â€œAll this way.” She spoke in a whispering mystified voice that trailed off. They were near enough to the chapel to feel the heat from the rack of small candles, a hundred flames lighting the jewel-crusted crucifix on the gilded altarpiece. “And all that expense,” she said. “We’re in these mountains, among all this gold and these cross-eyed Indians, and at best we are blindfolded.”
    â€œSo what?”
    â€œDid we have to come to Ecuador to find that out?”
    â€œObviously,” he said.
    â€œThat’s not why we came.”
    â€œI forget why we came.”
    They left the church and walked some more in the noisy clammy city. They came to a market and hoped to find handicrafts but saw only old-fashioned women’s underwear, piles of men’s shoes, stacks of brown trousers, folded blankets, and Chinese-made cooking pots. All this ordinariness in front of an ancient scribbled-on wall: ¡FUERA GRINGOS! Near the sign was a café, where they were greeted by a cheery woman who welcomed them, Ava saying
“Huevos”
Steadman felt sick before he had eaten much of his omelet. Ava said the beer she had drunk to quench her thirst made her feel dizzy. Was it the thin air? Steadman asked the waiter to take the beer away.
    Throughout the morning walk in Quito he had felt they were getting on well, like an old married couple, but here—at rest, at the café table, dazed by the altitude and the indigestion