mes by, and Nast is with him," Chahda continued. "I am surprised,
because Lazada goes right to his house. I wait around nearly all day.
Cannot call, because no phone handy. Well, tonight he took black
limousine, and he and Nast come to Paranaque. He has skull. They go to
this little barrio where we going, and go into nipa shack. Lazada stays
there with the skull. Nast goes off in the limousine. So what I think?"

"What do you think?" Rick asked.

"I think Nast goes to get somebody, to bring them to Lazada. So I rush
off and call you. Before you came, I saw Nast go by. So now the meeting
is being held, and we must figure how to get the skull."

Chahda reached forward and switched off the jeep's headlights. For an
instant it was very dark, then as Rick's eyes became adjusted to the
darkness he saw that the road was visible as a white pathway between the
rice paddies. Ahead were the lights of houses. They had reached the
barrio where the meeting was to be held.

Rick looked around and saw that the sky to the north was aglow with the
lights of Manila. Then he saw a plane take off and realized that they
were only a short distance from the airport.

Chahda pulled off the road into a patch of nipa palms, went through the
palms, and parked behind a feathery thicket of bamboo. "We walk to
shack," he said. He took a bolo from under the rear seat of the jeep and
tucked it into his belt.

The Hindu boy led them a hundred yards down the road, then turned off
onto a path. In a moment he pointed.

Ahead, alone in a clearing, was a typical nipa hut. It was built on
stilts in the traditional Filipino way, and there was room underneath
the supporting posts for a tall man to stand upright. The house itself
was square, with walls of woven thatch made from the nipa palm. The roof
was pyramidal, heavily thatched with layer after layer of straw. The
floor was of split bamboo, a single layer of springy bamboo strips as
wide as a man's thumb laid across a framing of whole bamboo supports.

Except that it allowed mosquitoes to roam in and out and gave no bar to
lizards or snakes, it was ideal for the climate. The openwork floor
allowed the breezes to circulate through the whole house. Also,
housekeeping was simple. Dust couldn't gather. It just fell through the
floor.

Filipinos had lived in houses like this for centuries, but the influence
of Western civilization was visible in the form of electric lights. It
was visible in another wa