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the pack over one shoulder and hurried down the stairs. Walking seemed to be too slow for him; he had to jog everywhere. When he got to the ground floor he boomed out a hearty goodbye to the janitor and then jogged out the door.
    The janitor called back, “Have a good voyage!”
    The janitor’s comment gave Squiggle a sudden nasty suspicion. Maybe Dr. Sponge was kidnapping (or monkey-napping) her for some horrible journey he was about to go on. Maybe he had only pretended to be friendly, to entice her into his backpack!
    Soon they were out of the zoo and passing through busy streets. The sidewalks were so crowded that Dr. Sponge knocked into people every few steps. He didn’t seem to care, and he didn’t pay any attention when people turned around to yell at him.
    Squiggle bounced up and down and banged her knee against a heavy book that was packed in with her. “This is terrible!” she thought. She considered unzipping the bag, leaping out, and running away. But just then they passed a policeman. Squiggle couldn’t see very well out of the little bit of zipper that was undone, but she thought it might be the same officer who had tried to capture her at the zoo. She decided it was better to stay in the backpack and see what happened next.
    After a while Dr. Sponge began to talk to her. He spoke in a loud voice so that she could hear him over his shoulder. She couldn’t speak up enough to carry on a conversation, so she sat quietly and listened. Everyone on the sidewalk must have thought he was crazy, but he didn’t bother with that.
    He began to tell her about all the places in the world he had been and all the strange and wonderful people he had met. Most of the names and places she had never heard of; but, as you know, she hadn’t read very much. She had the impression of jungles and a blaring hot sun and mist rising up from the ground, and strange animals, little squeaky ones hiding in the ferns, and big dangerous ones, poisonous snakes dripping off of the trees, and bright green and red frogs that you must never eat or you will die (“I wonder,” thought Squiggle, “if that is a poisonous frog tattooed on his eyelid. And who would want to eat a frog anyway?”). He told her about a secret village hidden in the jungle, where people lived exactly as they had for the past ten thousand years. Except that in the Council Hut, the big one in the center of the village, they kept a fax machine, three Superman comic books, and an empty Coke bottle.
    They crossed a street and jogged through heavy traffic. Dr. Sponge’s voice got covered up by the clashing, grinding noises of cars and trucks. When they reached the opposite side, he was still talking. He had moved on to another topic. He was telling her about underwater caves. Pictures formed in Squiggle’s mind, of floating beautifully through warm water, in dark, craggy stone caverns. Only a beam of light moved around here and there. Strange sightless fish and giant crabs darted about. Feathery plants hung from the ceiling and swayed in the currents. . . .
    Then he told her about the dry, unbelievably hot, dusty savanna. You could see only one tree way in the distance, all crabbed up and bent over. And there were elephants everywhere! Thirty of them. And the elephants came closer and turned into polar bears, with humped shoulders and narrow heads, yawning and growling and flapping their wings until they had roosted in the tops of palm trees. Little monkeys were climbing up the palm trees to get coconuts. And peo ple dressed up in white cloth were standing around under the trees to pick up the snowballs and throw them at each other in the Great Greenland Snowball Festival.
    (The jogging motion and the heat inside the backpack were putting Squiggle to sleep. She was getting confused.)
    Just as he was explaining how he got the green squares around his eyes (and Squiggle was too sleepy to remember the story) he stopped