He rode along the sandy road on a rusty moped with a vacant socket where the headlamp used to be. "Bring it back before dark, Senor. I give you one with a light that works!" This was the road that cut across the island from the commercial Western beaches to the raw, surf-pounded Eastern ones, a road flanked by long vistas of scrub palm and occasional hard-scrabble farms hacked and burned in a violent act of liberation from the undergrowth. The air smelled, as did most of Mexico, of smoke, flowers, and rotting fruit. Looking up from a map pinched between his thumb and the left handgrip, he spotted several funereal forms hunched on the road ahead, rippling in the heat. These were a motley pair of black-winged vultures, each the size of a small labrador retriever, and they briefly abandoned their solemn communion over the smashed carcass of an iguana as he approached, flapping the tattered looking wings with enormous effort in the tropical sun, an effort which landed them some three feet from the road's shoulder, where they turned away in unison from their postponed luncheon to look into the jungle with blank eyes.

He swerved past the roadkill and glimpsed a crossroad ahead. He stopped at the intersection and found its counterpart in the map as the Mexican heat closed on him like something that had been stalking just behind as he clipped along on the bike, and now pounced. He turned into the dirt road and followed the line of a wood fence beside a decaying plantation until it deadended at a dilapidated farm house. The house featured a ramshackle porch upon which two straw-hatted farmers had found sanctuary against the afternoon heat. They treated his appearance as the vultures had : a brief glance and then the glazed stare into the steaming forest. To his right, a large mass of stone was partially engulfed in twining vines. He parked the moped and unsnapped the camera case as he walked toward the monolith. From beneath the strangling green growth stone heads peered out at him, sprawled contorted bodies, swastikas, pinwheels, granite roses, skulls, all manner of detritus left behind by these ancient men, icons of luck and sex and death and sacrifice, silent in stone, anything but mute.

He snapped the photos, wiped the sweat from his eyes, and batted away at the insects that were finding him. He moved into the monolith to find the narrow shade it offered, and found another pair of eyes, inches away, looking into his. Startled, he stepped back, but the huge lizard was unperturbed, tongue lapping the hot air, perched upon a lintel of crumbling rock, a piece of pagan sculpture come alive. He didn't look away, but instead looked deeply and calmly into the man's eyes. One clawed foot shifted, dislodging a small chunk of carved stone, and the Iguana continued to taste the air and stare and the thought came to the man "all this shall pass, all but this creature. And the heat." And again he raised the camera, but he couldn't. It felt like sacrilege, a cheapening of the realization.

He climbed back onto the machine and traveled down the dirt path to the road. Here he turned, and attempting to free himself of the heat, aaccelerated the machine in a desparate rush to the ocean.