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gift: cakes, candies, fruit, souvenir postcards, or a simple, warm handshake. All kinds of characters turned up: farmers, businessmen, army officers, and even a young Swiss, a mochilero like ourselves, who had drifted into Rurrenabaque and decided to settle down. He had bought a plot of land a little way up the Beni River. Every day he rowed himself up there in a small boat to till his cornfield.

We ordered cakes and coffee from the hotel restaurant for our numerous guests. The hotel owner herself scarcely left our table and never stopped talking.

Toward noon Tico passed by on his way to the river, and we joined him, poor Kevin toting me on his back. Kevin took pictures and asked one of Tico's crewmen to take one of us together with his employer.

A strange phenomenon bedevilled both Kevin and me; I had a funny-looking lump on my forehead, and Kevin had one on his throat. I was occasionally seized by a severe pain, as if someone or something were pinching at me from within. Tico noticed it and knew immediately what the trouble was.

'That's the boro,' he said.

'What's the boro?' we asked, and Tico explained that it results from the bite of a mosquito whose sting deposits an egg under the skin. In time the egg hatches into a worm, and the worm begins crawling around inside the body.