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brick was the popular building material. Wooden and cardboard plugs filled space originally covered with glass. Drooping palm trees lined the highway, all of them looking like they were suffering from tropical diseases, their leaves clumped and yellow, some of them bald as a Canadian maple tree in January. Trees away from traffic fared better, as I discovered later on. Where the houses were badly cared for, the trees looked scrofulous. The rusting skeleton of a French 2CV looked like the ravished leftovers from a feast at the side of the road. I caught a glimpse of the ocean from the window on my companion’s side of the car, but it vanished again behind more blocks of three-floor ocher flats. The glimpse was a postcard view and I promised myself to come back some time to enjoy it properly. The priest and I watched our steady approach to the great Iron Gates of Takot while the taxi climbed up the hill. As we passed through the gates into the Old Town, I could see not only that the gates were modern but also that they were afflicted with the same disease troubling the trees along the edge of the road. We didn’t actually go through the gates: the road pierced the wall to the left of the high metal doors. From a security point of view, it was like finding a fiberboard back on a steel bank vault.
    “Ah, there’s a tuk-tuk !” my fellow passenger said, pointing out the window at a three-wheeled scooter-like conveyance, a little like what the French call “Kamikazes.” (I’d learned that at the movies.) “I’ve nearly been run down by these things more times than I’ve heard mass.” Later, my companion said: “I see you are admiring the famous gates!” He was mopping his face with a bandana. “The Baedeker doesn’t say so, but the allied liberators turned the original gates into bombs and shells at the end of the Second World War. They’ve been rebuilt, but in aluminum. The writers leave that part out of the guidebooks.”
    “I’d forgotten about the war. I didn’t think the Japanese got this far.”
    “Oh, indeed they did. Farther. The famous Bridge on the River Kwai is just a hundred miles north of here.”
    “You’re better than a guidebook, Father.” He introduced himself as Father James O’Mahannay from Chicago, now running a school for poor children in Takot. We shook hands in the crowded back seat.
    “I’ve been here so long, my friend, that in self-defense I’ve become an expert on the place. There used to be a little man, a sort of baboo , who told tourists whatever popped into his head. ‘This was the original Garden of Eden. This is the site of the Kingdom of the real Lord Jim.’ He wasn’t to be trusted with visitors. He used to announce his prowess in speaking English by parading his mastery of English grammar. He would greet people with ‘Good, better, best!’ to put the seal on his exquisite knowledge. He died of drink, like so many, like so many.” The priest shook his head sadly, inspecting his fingers.
    “I guess a lot of history took place here over the centuries, things we know nothing about at home.”
    “Yes. Yes. We know so little about this part of the world. Did you know that three nuns were beheaded a century and a half ago not three blocks from here? Yes, yes! The incident was hushed up for the sake of trade. A major diplomatic coup! Over there, in that ratty place with the iron balcony, the writer Edward Lear once lived.”
    “Lear? Remind me. I can’t quite place him.”
    “Limericks, The Owl and the Pussycat , he invented the ‘runcible spoon’ …”
    “Oh, yes. ‘And a ring in the end of his nose, his nose!’ I remember now.” Yes, I could remember that bit of poetry from my school days, but I had already forgotten the name of my companion. “You’re a born teacher, Father.”
    “We’re all accursed with something. My mother said ‘Go out and teach.’ And so I did, although I think she meant within the neighborhood. They think I’m peculiar back