They would have gained considerable altitude over the bay, and Janice must have seen the cause of all this from the air — the crystalline pillar poised like an unanswerable question above the lush green foothills.

We came off the smugglers’ trail into a nest of Thai military police.

Hitch made a brave attempt to reverse the Daimler and haul ass out of trouble, but there was nowhere to go except back up that dead-end trail. When a bullet kicked up dust by the front wheel, Hitch braked and killed the engine.

The soldiers bade us kneel, hands behind our necks. One of them approached us and put the barrel of his pistol against Hitch’s temple, then mine. He said something I couldn’t translate; his comrades laughed.

A few minutes later we were inside a military wagon, under the guard of four armed men who spoke no English or pretended not to. I wondered how much contraband Hitch was carrying and whether that made me an accomplice or an accessory to a capital offense. But no one said anything about drugs. No one said anything at all, even when the truck lurched into motion.

I asked politely where we were going. The nearest soldier — a barrel-ribbed, gap-toothed adolescent — shrugged and waved the butt of his rifle at me in a desultory threat.

They took Hitch’s camera. He never got it back. Nor his motorcycle, come to that. The army was economical in such matters.

We rode in that truck for almost eighteen hours and spent the next night in a Bangkok prison, in separate cells and without communication privileges. I learned later that an American threat-assessment team wanted to “debrief” (i.e., interrogate) us before we talked to the press, so we sat in our isolation cells with buckets for toilets while, across the world, sundry well-dressed men booked flights for Don Muang Airport. These things take time.

My wife and child were less than five miles away in the embassy hospital, but I didn’t know that and neither did Janice.