This time he followed the guide through the tangle of narrow alleys without hesitation and without the slightest suspicion. The guide was a slim, delicate man with a perpetual smile on his face and rounded gestures, who was constantly bowing politely. The damp sticky heat spawned a cloud of flying insects out of the misty swamp. They crossed and recrossed fetid canals, treading on rickety bridges whose planks were eaten away by the moisture. The thick water in the canals stood almost motionless, steaming. And in the crowded streets throngs of quiet people moved unhurriedly in a cloud of decomposition and incense from household shrines. The odors mingled with the smoke of damp wood. It was amazing to him that he did not lose his guide in the dense crowd, in which almost all the men looked like his man, the women did too, and in fact it was hard to tell the difference here between the sexes. Because of a religious prohibition on taking life, there were leprous dogs sprawling in yards, in streets, and in the dust of the rough alleys, rats as big as cats crossing the road unconcernedly and unhurriedly in convoys, mangy, boil-ridden cats, gray mice that flashed sharp red eyes at him. Again and again there was a dry crunch under his shoes as he trod on cockroaches, some of which were as big as hamburgers. They were so lazy or indifferent that they made barely any effort to escape their fate, or perhaps they were afflicted with some kind of orthopteran plague. As they were crushed, a jet of fatty murky-brown juice squirted underfoot. From the water rose the stench of open sewers and dead fish and frying and rotting seafood, a ferocious blend of the odors of reproduction and death. The heady rotting effervescence of the hot damp city, which always attracted him from a distance and yet when he arrived always made him want to leave and never return. But he clung to his guide. Or perhaps it was not his first guide, but a second or a third, a casual passerby out of the crowd of comely, womanish men, or perhaps it really was a girl in boy's clothing, a slender, elusive creature among thousands of identical creatures moving like fish in the tropical rain that poured down from a height here as though tubs of used water were being simultaneously emptied from all the upper stories, water that had been used for washing or cooking fish. The whole city stood on a marshy delta whose water frequently, with or without the river rising, flooded whole quarters, whose residents could be seen standing up to their knees in water inside their own hovels, bending over as though in deep prostration, fishing with tin cans in their own bedrooms for the fish that had come in with the floodwater. In the streets there was a perpetual roaring and a stench of burned engine fuel because the masses of ancient cars had no exhaust pipes. Among disintegrating taxicabs moved rickshaws drawn by young boys or old men, and pedicabs. Skeletal, half-naked men passed carrying buckets at either end of a flexed yoke. The hot, filthy river traversed the city bearing on its murky water a slow-moving, congested traffic of cargo boats, barges, dinghies, and rafts laden with bleeding raw meat, vegetables, and heaps of silvery fish. Among these craft bobbed wooden flotsam and bloated corpses of drowned beasts both great and small, buffalo, dogs, and monkeys. On the skyline, in the few places where there was a gap between the dilapidated hovels, rose palaces, towers, and pagodas sparkling with delusive gold turrets set alight by the sun. On the street corners shaven-headed monks in saffron robes held empty brass bowls, waiting wordlessly for offerings of rice. In the yards and by the doors of the hovels stood tiny spirit houses, like dolls' houses, with miniature furniture and gilt ornaments, where the spirits of the dead dwelt near their living dear ones, watching over all their doings and receiving daily offerings of a few grains of rice and a thimbleful of rice beer. Small, apathetic twelve-year-old prostitutes, whose bodies fetched ten dollars here, sat on walls and sidewalks, playing with rag dolls. But nowhere in the whole city had he ever seen a couple embracing or linking arms in the street. And here they were outside the city, with the warm rain falling relentlessly over everything and the guide, treading as daintily as a dancer even though he was not dancing, seemingly levitating; no longer bowing politely, no longer smiling or even troubling to look back to make sure his customer had not got lost; and the warm rair falling relentlessly on the buffalo drawing a cartload of bamboo, on the elephant laden with crates of vegetables, on the square paddy fields flooded with murky water, and on the coconut palms looking like monstrous women with dozens of soft heavy breasts growing all over their chests and backs and thighs. Warm rain on thatched roofs of houses constructed on widely spaced wooden piles planted astride the water. Here and there a village woman dressed in layers of clothes, washing almost up to her neck in a filthy canal, or laying fish traps. And the suffocating blast. And silence within the miserable rustic temple, and then a minor miracle: the warm rain did not cease, but fell relentlessly, somehow, even inside the chambers of the temple, which were partitioned by mirrors in order to mislead unclean spirits, which are able to move only in straight lines, which is why everything made of circles, curves, and arches is beautiful and good, whereas the opposite invites tribulation. The guide had vanished and the pockmarked monk, who might have been a eunuch, rose and declared in curious Hebrew: Not yet ready. Not yet enough. The warm rain did not cease until Yoel was forced to get up and take off his clothes, in which he had fallen asleep on the living-room sofa; naked he turned off the flickering television, switched on the air-conditioning in the bedroom, took a cold shower, and went outside to turn off the sprinklers, then went indoors again and lay down to sleep.