Janice, of course, was frantic. She must have feared the worst: the Japanese encephalitis we all read about in the papers that year, or the dengue that had killed so many people in Myanmar. Doctor Dexter diagnosed a common influenza (it had been going around the Phuket and Ko Samui crowd since March) and pumped her full of antivirals.

Janice settled down in the clinic waiting room, still trying periodically to phone me. But I had left my phone in a backpack on a shelf in the rental. She would have tried Hitch, maybe, but Hitch didn’t believe in unencrypted communication; he carried a GPS locator and a compass and figured that was more than enough for any truly rugged male.

When I first glimpsed the pillar through a scrim of forest I took it to be the chedi of a distant Wat, one of the Buddhist temples scattered throughout Southeast Asia. You can find a photograph of Angkor Wat, for instance, in any encyclopedia. You’d recognize it if you saw it: stone reliquary towers that look weirdly organic, as if some enormous troll had left its bones to fossilize in the jungle.

But this chedi — and I saw more of it as we followed the switchback road up a long ridge — was the wrong shape, the wrong color.

We crested the ridge into a roadblock of Royal Thai Police, border patrol cars, and assorted armed men in rust-pocked SUVs. They were turning away all traffic. Four of the soldiers had trained their weapons on an ancient Hyundai songthaew packed with squawking chickens. The border police looked both very young and very hostile, wearing khakis and aviator glasses and holding their rifles at a nervous angle. I didn’t want to challenge them and I told Hitch so.

I don’t know if he heard me. His attention was on the monument — I’ll use that word for now — in the distance.

We could see it more clearly now. It sat astride a higher terrace of the hill, partially obscured by a ring of mist. Without any visible reference the size of it was difficult to judge, but I guessed it must have been at least three hundred feet tall.