Cryptonomicon

Subject matter of interviews could be induced by Yours Truly only by recognizing occasional English words & adopting a basically intuitive pattern-recognition approach not amenable to rational explication here. Most common keywords: Nippon, the Nipponese, the War, Gold, Treasure, Excavations, Yamashita, Mass Executions. Emotional tenor of these conversations consisted of polite but extreme skepticism on part of DMS, while confronted by desperate need to be believed on part of interviewees. In the end DMS did not believe any of them as far as I could discern. They either became obstreperous & had to be shown the door (glancing warily at Jean Nguyen & Jackie Woo) or adopted a wounded & aggrieved stance. DMS was amused by the former & disgusted by the latter. Yours Truly mused silently upon inappropriateness of his own presence in this setting & fondly remembered predictable comforts of home, even of Manila. Upon completion of breakfast & of interviews, DMS divulged, in response to my inquiries, that he had been at it for two hours before I had arrived & that formation of this milling crowd occurs spontaneously before doors of any lodgings he takes in the Philippines owing to his reputation as treasure-hunter. We had avoided it in San Juan only because he goes there frequently and has already interviewed everyone in region with Nipponese War Gold stories found 99.9% of them lacking credibility, investigating the remaining .1% with occasionally lucrative results.

THE GRACE OF GOD had been washed and buffed by Fidel Gad in magnificently insouciant gesture of defiance of jungle elements. We proceeded across river. Racial variations were conspicuous on faces, and in physiognomies, of townspeople. Philippines were settled by countless overlapping waves of prehistoric migrants each racially & linguistically incompatible with the last; this in combination with the spatial involution phenom. which I have, I think sufficiently belabored by this point, makes for your basic patchwork of different ethnic groups. The fork in the river around which this town was nucleated was meeting-point of unofficial turfs of three such different cultures. Lure of bright lights, or even dim, flickering ones, has drawn thousands down from mountains in recent generations to establish several distinct barangays. This morning's interviewees were migrants from the mountains, or their sons or grandsons, who claimed to have first-hand knowledge of sites of Yamashita's hoards, or to have heard about same from late ancestors.

After covering about 1.6 LACs through jungle (roads, slopes, & conditions getting worse all the time) we encountered another military roadblock that had (somewhat incredibly to my mind) been established at a pass over a ridge, overlooking some rice terraces that had (even more incredibly) been hacked out of an essentially vertical south-facing slope thousands of years ago by the evidently fearsomely tenacious ancestors of the locals. Here we were thoroughly searched. My testicles were squeezed at some length by a sergeant with a pencil mustache, whose motives did not appear to be sexual, but who simultaneously looked me searchingly in the eye, awaiting a look of submission or hopelessness on the face of the squeezed. The others were subjected to the same treatment and probably endured it with more stoicism than Yours Truly. No lethal weapons were found attached to any of our scrota, but (surprise!) Jean ("John Wayne") Nguyen and Jackie Woo were discovered to be armed to the teeth, and DMS somewhat less so. This is the part where Yours Truly expected to be shot in the nape of the neck whilst kneeling above a shallow grave, but ironically the authorities were far more interested in my cache of Cap'n Crunch than the weaponry sported by my comrades. Negotiations took place between DMS and the captain in charge of this outpost, in the privacy of a tent. DMS emerged with a thinner wallet and full clearance to proceed, on the conditions that (1) all supplies of Cap'n Crunch be donated to the officers' mess, and (2) a full inventory of weapons and ammo would be taken upon our return & compared with today's findings to make sure that we were not smuggling arms to the Nice People Around.