There was no sign of dawn in the skies.
Suddenly I heard the dogs barking furiously across the dark, and then I heard the faint clip-clop of a horse's hooves.
It came closer and closer.
What kind of mad rider in the night would this be?
Then I saw an apparition: a wild horse, white as a ghost, came trotting down the road directly toward Dean.
Behind him the dogs yammered and contended.
I couldn't see them, they were dirty old jungle dogs, but the horse was white as snow and immense and almost phosphorescent and easy to see.
I felt no panic for Dean.
The horse saw him and trotted right by his head, passed the car like a ship, whinnied softly, and continued on through town, bedeviled by the dogs, and clip-clopped back to the jungle on the other side, and all I heard was the faint hoofbeat fading away in the woods.
The dogs subsided and sat to lick themselves.
What was this horse?
What myth and ghost, what spirit?
I told Dean about it when he woke up.
He thought I'd been dreaming.
Then he recalled faintly dreaming of a white horse, and I told him it had been no dream.
Stan Shephard slowly woke up.
The faintest movements, and we were sweating profusely again.
It was still pitch dark.
"Let's start the car and blow some air!" I cried.
"I'm dying of heat."
"Right!"
We roared out of town and continued along the mad highway with our hair flying.
Dawn came rapidly in a gray haze, revealing dense swamps sunk on both sides, with tall, forlorn, viny trees leaning and bowing over tangled bottoms.
We bowled right along the railroad tracks for a while.
The strange radio-station antenna of Ciudad Mante appeared ahead, as if we were in Nebraska.
We found a gas station and loaded the tank just as the last of the jungle-night bugs hurled themselves in a black mass against the bulbs and fell fluttering at our feet in huge wriggly groups, some of them with wings a good four inches long, others frightful dragonflies big enough to eat a bird, and thousands of immense yangling mosquitoes and unnamable spidery insects of all sorts.
I hopped up and down on the pavement for fear of them; I finally ended up in the car with my feet in my hands, looking fearfully at the ground where they swarmed around our wheels.
"Lessgo!" I yelled.
Dean and Stan weren't perturbed at all by the bugs; they calmly drank a couple of bottles of Mission Orange and kicked them away from the water cooler.
Their shirts and pants, like mine, were soaked in the blood and black of thousands of dead bugs.
We smelled our clothes deeply.
"You know, I'm beginning to like this smell," said Stan.
"I can't smell myself any more."
"It's a strange, good smell," said Dean.
"I'm nor. going to change my shirt till Mexico City, I want to take it all in and remember it."
So off we roared again, creating air for hot. caked faces.
Then the mountains loomed ahead, all green.
After this climb we would be on the great central plateau again and ready to roll ahead to Mexico City.
In no time at all we soared to an elevation of five thousand feet among misty passes that overlooked steaming yellow rivers a mile below.
It was the great River Moctezuma.
The Indians along the road began to be extremely weird.
They were a nation in themselves, mountain Indians, shut off from everything else but the Pan-American Highway. They were short and squat and dark, with bad teeth; they carried immense loads on their backs.
Across enormous vegetated ravines we saw patchworks of agriculture on steep slopes.
They walked up and down those slopes and worked the crops.
Dean drove the car five miles an hour to see.
"Whooee, this I never thought existed!"
High on the highest peak, as great as any Rocky Mountain peak, we saw bananas growing.
Dean got out of the car to point, to stand around rubbing his belly.
We were on a ledge where a little thatched hut suspended itself over the precipice of the world.
The sun created golden hazes that obscured the Moctezuma, now more than a mile below.