Cryptonomicon

He recognizes Jackie Woo lounging at one of the tables, drinking tea and reading a bright magazine. Amy's in the adjacent kitchen, embroiled in Tagalog girl-talk with a couple of middle-aged ladies who are handling the preparations for the meal. This place seems pretty safe, and so Randy stops in the open, punches in the digits that only he and Goto Dengo know, and takes a GPS reading. According to the machine, they are no more than 4500 meters away from the main drift of Golgotha. Randy checks the heading and determines that it is uphill from here. Although the jungle blurs the underlying shape of the earth, he thinks that it's going to be up in the valley of a nearby river.

Forty-five hundred meters seems impossibly close, and he's still standing there trying to convince himself that his memory is sound when the ragged voices of the worshippers suddenly spill out across the compound as the chapel's door is pushed open. Enoch Root emerges, wearing (inevitably) what Randy would describe as a wizard's robe. But as he walks across the compound he shucks it off to reveal sensible khakis underneath, and hands the robe to a young Filipino acolyte who scurries back inside with it. The singing trails off and then Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe emerges from the church, followed by John Wayne and several people who appear to be locals. Everyone drifts towards the pavilion. The alertness that comes with being in a new place, combined with the neurological aftermath of that shockingly big and long orgasm, has left Randy's senses sharper, and his mind clearer, than they've ever been, and he's impatient to get going. But he can't dispute the wisdom of getting a good breakfast, so he shakes hands all around and sits down with the others. There is a bit of small talk about how his pamboat voyage went.

"Your friends should have come into the country that way," says Doug Shaftoe, and then goes on to explain that Avi and both of the Gotos were supposed to be here yesterday, but they were detained at the airport for some hours and eventually had to fly back to Tokyo while some mysterious immigration hassles were ironed out. "Why didn't they go to Taipei or Hong Kong?" Randy wonders aloud since both those cities are much closer to Manila. Doug stares at him blankly and observes that both of those are Chinese cities, and reminds him that their presumed adversary now is General Wing, who has a lot of pull in places like that.

Several backpacks have already been prepared, laden mostly with bottled water. After everyone's had a chance to digest breakfast, Douglas MacArthur Shaftoe, Jackie Woo, John Wayne, Enoch Root, America Shaftoe, and Randall Lawrence Waterhouse all don packs. They begin to stroll uphill, passing out of the compound and into a transitional zone of big-leaved traveler trees and giant clusters of bamboo: ten-centimeter-thick trunks spraying out and up from central roots, like frozen shell-bursts, to heights of at least ten meters, the poles striped green and brown where the husky leaves are peeling away. The canopy of the jungle looms higher and higher, accentuated by the fact that it's uphill from here, and emits a fantastic whistling noise, like a phaser on overload. As they enter the shade of the canopy the racket of crickets is added to that whistling noise. It sounds as though there must be millions of crickets and millions of whatever's making the whistling noise, but from time to time the sound will suddenly stop and then start up again, so if there are a lot of them, they are all following the same score.

The place is filled with plants that in America are only seen in pots, but that grow to the size of oak trees here, so big that Randy's mind can't recognize them as, for example, the same kind of Diefenbachia that Grandmother Waterhouse used to have growing on the counter in her downstairs bathroom. There is an incredible variety of butterflies, for whom the wind-free environment seems to be congenial, and they weave in and out among huge spiderwebs that call to mind the design of Enoch Root's chapel. But it is clear that the place is ultimately ruled by ants; in fact it makes the most sense to think of the jungle as a living tissue of ants with minor infestations of trees, birds, and humans. Some of them are so small that they are, to other ants, as those ants are to people; they prosecute their ant activities in the same physical space but without interfering, like many signals on different frequencies sharing the same medium. But there are a fair number of ants carrying other ants, and Randy assumed that they are not doing it for altruistic reasons.