We circled up the smugglers’ trail as far as the Daimler would take us, then concealed the bike in a thicket and hiked a quarter mile more.

The trail was rough, designed for maximum concealment but not maximum comfort. Steep real estate, Hitch called it. Hitch carried hiking boots in the Daimler’s saddlebag but I had to make do with my high-tops, and I worried about snakes and insects.

Had we followed the trail far enough we would no doubt have arrived at some hidden drug cache, an extraction factory, maybe even the Burmese border, but twenty minutes took us as close to the monument as we cared to get — as close as we could get.

We came within a thousand yards of it.

We weren’t the first people to see it at that proximity. It had blocked a road, after all, and it had been there for at least twelve hours, assuming the sound of last night’s “Navy jet” had in fact marked the arrival of the artifact.

But we were among the first.

Hitch stopped at the fallen trees. The forest here — pines, mostly, and some wild bamboo — had collapsed in a radial pattern around the base of the monument, and the wreckage obliterated the path. The pines had obviously been toppled by some kind of pressure wave, but they hadn’t been burned. Quite the opposite. The leaves of the uprooted bamboo were still green and only beginning to wither in the afternoon heat. Everything here — the trees, the trail, the ground itself — was crisply cool. Cold, in fact, if you put your hand down among the windfall. Hitch pointed this out. I was reluctant to take my eyes off the monument itself.

If I had known what was to come, my awe might have been tempered. This was — in light of what followed — a relatively minor miracle. But all I knew was that I had stumbled into an event immensely stranger than anything Frank Edwards had uncovered in the back numbers of the Pittsburgh Press, and what I felt was partly fear, partly a dizzy elation.