The island of Ahua can be reached from the mainland in a day's journey by sea. While it is possible to land a boat at many places on the coast, explorers landing in any of the deserted areas have either wandered inconclusively, failing to encounter any form of habitation, or have not been heard of again. Only by arriving at what the rest of the world assumes to be the capital city (for no better reason than that it is the only city known to the world) has any outsider made contact with Ahuan culture. Somehow, the name Ahuacaçan has become attached to it, but it is not known what the Ahuans call it or whether they consider it in any sense a capital.

I had paid little heed to these hyperbolical words of another visitor to Ahua, but as Kado and I in our hired boat approached the place where we were assured we could dock, the first part of this gnomic utterance proved exact. To be sure, there was a considerable bustle of boats of all sizes, and a town extending for several miles along the shore in either direction. But in all the hubbub, there was no clear pattern of activity, and we were unable to find the public moorings, if there were any. Each time we made for the shore, we found ourselves intruding into what was clearly private water, or cutting across lines of traffic that had not previously been evident. After one particularly vexatious near-collision with a rowing boat, the occupant drew alongside and climbed aboard. He made straight for the cockpit and would have taken command from Kado had he not obstinately stared down the intruder.

Kado had made a brief visit to Ahuacaçan some years before. "Never speak first to an Ahuan," he had advised me. "Wait for him to speak, and look confident that you know what you are about and that it is he who must demean himself by opening a conversation."

"You go in?" said the pilot (for such I tentatively took him to be) in English, in a tone which was simultaneously a question, a statement, and a presumption that we were ignorant fools not to know the way. By way of answer, Kado stood aside from the wheel and looked out of the window at nothing in particular, as if the pilot were not there. If this was how we would have to deal with all Ahuans, I began to apprehend the difficulty of the expedition.

We followed what seemed to be a tortuous route to the shore, and eventually arrived at a berth which cannot have been more than half a mile from the point where we took on our pilot, although the place looked nothing like anything I had been able to see from there. At least the mooring bollards were identifably bollards. The pilot left the helm and silently confronted Kado once more. What was expected now? A gratuity? Docking fee? Passports? I said, "Is there anything-", but I had barely begun to speak when he snorted with an air of irritation and anger, stepped onto the quayside and walked off, muttering a few words in Ahuan to a couple of passers by. They looked at us with unreadable expressions. Such was our arrival in Ahua.

Our original plan had been to hire a larger boat and bring a four-wheel drive with us (knowing well that we would be unable to purchase or hire any similar vehicle in Ahua). We were dissuaded of this during our preliminary planning by a conversation with an explorer who had returned from Ahua with most of his sanity intact. "No roads," he said. "Four-wheel drive?" we asked, falling into the abbreviated way of speaking that affects everyone who has had contact with Ahua. His silence indicated that we had missed his point, but we could not frame any question that would induce him to expand further. We had decided to take his word for it, and had instead brought mountain bikes. We knew that the further we travelled into Ahua, the more difficult it would be to come by supplies, so the panniers were already heavily loaded, as if we were exploring an uninhabited wilderness -- which, in a sense, we were.

Our informant's silence then seemed verbose compared with the dockside scene in front of us. Where the water had been crowded, the quayside was nearly empty, with only a few people here and there going about their business. Looking at the water again, I noticed that it appeared not nearly so crowded as it had been on our arrival. I was perplexed by the fact that several larger vessels that I recalled seeing on the way in were no longer in view. I could see neither any familiar craft, nor on land any of the landmarks I had picked out from the sea. In fact, I had no idea where we were. I scanned the area with binoculars. Whichever boat I looked at was either deserted, or showed one or two Ahuans doing nothing in particular, yet there was a distant sound of activity and commotion. Whatever the source was, it was always outside the field of view in the binoculars.

No two Ahuans were dressed alike. There was not merely the usual variation that one would see anywhere else: differences of colour and style, but with only a few different types of clothes being worn. Here, everyone appeared to be wearing radically different costume, the social significance of which was opaque. Physiognomy, skin colour, body shape: these also exhibited the same variety. I suddenly wondered if the bodies hidden by their clothes were equally diverse, and even started looking to see if anyone had three eyes, or gill slits. I realised that my heart was pounding and paused to get a grip of myself. I looked again, more calmly; everyone was identifiably human. But looking at my own hands, I felt a strange lack of certainty that five digits was the proper number.

It was by now midday. We decided to first explore the immediate neighbourhood on foot. Visitors to Ahua are not entirely unknown, and it is generally considered that those Ahuans who are accustomed to contact with them are easier to deal with than those of the interior. Our experience with the pilot suggested that this would be purely relative. Before leaving our boat, we secured it to the bollards with heavy chain, for judging by the tales of other travellers, only in this way would we have any likelihood of finding it again. It is not that it would be stolen, but that for one reason or another, someone would find it necessary to move it to another mooring, and dealing with Ahuan officialdom to retrieve it would be beyond all possibility.

"New? Bar down the road." The words had been spoken and the speaker passed by before I had even noticed her presence. A tall woman, whose dark skin suggested she was not native to the country.

"She can't have been here very long," said Kado. "We could just about understand what she said."

"Even so, she must be easier to deal with than the Ahuans," I said. "Perhaps we could invite her to join us."

"Go ahead if you like, but I don't think you'll get anywhere."

She was still walking along the dock side, about a hundred yards distant. I set off after her, but no sooner had I begun than she turned and entered a nondescript building that could equally have been a warehouse or offices. I walked to where she had disappeared, and found only a door that looked as if it had not been in use for a long time. There was no handle, only a keyhole. I pushed on the door, but it did not even rattle. I could see nothing through the keyhole, and the windows were opaque with grime. It was silent. I knocked. There was the sound of a faint movement from inside, then the silence intensified.

I turned back and was suddenly disoriented. I could no longer recognise the road I had just walked down. I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall, fighting a wave of nausea. I mentally retraced my steps. We had moored a hundred yards in that direction, and Kado should be between there and here. I opened my eyes and looked. It took several minutes to convince myself that this was the same dockside and to pick out Kado's figure. Not a single detail of the scene that I could remember was different, yet it still seemed completely unfamiliar. I uneasily walked back.

"First attack of Ahuan fever?" he said. "It got me much worse. I lay on the ground for half an hour trying to work out which way was up. You ok now?"

"Sure," I said, more confidently than I felt. "How about looking for this bar she mentioned?"

"As good an idea as any. Of course, it might be two miles down the road, three blocks from the quayside, and up an unmarked flight of stairs."

But we had only gone half a mile before coming upon what we easily recognised as some sort of bar or café. It might or might not have been the one the woman had referred to. We entered.

I stopped at the doorway, taking in the scene. It was by no means obvious precisely what type of establishment this was. At some tables, people were eating or drinking. At others, people did nothing in particular. There was no recognisable bar for serving drinks, and none of the people on their feet were clearly staff.

The quietness of the quayside was present here also, for rather than the animated hubbub that one might expect, people's conversations proceeded in fitful bursts, their words addressed to the air as much as to each other, in the strange cadences of the Ahuan tongues that give nothing for the foreign ear to grasp.

Kado had immediately gone to an unoccupied table and sat down. He summoned someone -- a waiter? presumably -- and spoke briefly to him, then beckoned me over.

"We are fortunate to have found this place," he said. "It wasn't as easy as this ten years ago."

Someone suddenly appeared at my elbow, without my having noticed his arrival. He placed two large, full glasses on the table. Beer?

"I've no idea what this is," Kado said. "Try it and see," doing so himself. He suddenly laughed. "I thought it was too easy. You realise there isn't a single Ahuan in here? All foreigners, for all that they might fancy they can speak the languages. This," he said, tapping his glass, "is indeed beer. Very unusual, lime-flavoured, but definitely beer, I'd guess imported."

Emboldened by this, we proceeded to order a meal. It might have been kangaroo meat for all I could tell, but it satisfied our hunger. When we had finished, Kado left an apparently arbitrary sum of money -- English, not Ahuan -- on the table and we left.

"How did you decide how much to pay?" I asked.

"It doesn't matter. You can't ask for information in this country. If they're not satisfied with what I left it's up to them to raise the matter, and they can't do that or they'd lose face. If we were regulars here, we'd lose face by offering the wrong amount, and the more face we lost, the more difficult it would be to get served next time."

Back at our boat, we lifted our bikes ashore and set off into the town.

"Roads are not roads." In most countries, there are roads, and there is mere empty ground between buildings. Towns contain buildings separated by roads; farms and small settlements contain buildings separated by empty ground. In this city, however, the distinction was lost. Apart from a few thoroughfares which we agreed must be "roads", it was never clear whether the gaps between buildings had any particular direction to them, or led anywhere. Even the "roads" proved unreliable. We would cycle confidently down one, only to find it peter out in another aimless space or dead-end in a private yard. There might be a solitary Ahuan, going about his unknowable business, who would stop and watch us, saying without words, "You are correct, this is not a through road, this is private property, go back."

If there had simply been no roads, our journey might have been easier, but whenever we decided that the buildings were merely randomly scattered, we would come upon what was unmistakably a street sign. Unreadable, of course -- ordinary Ahuan script is more difficult to decipher than the most ornate of Arabic calligraphy. Several times we heard heavy traffic in the distance, but only once were we able to track it down and discover a busy highway. It did us no good, for it turned out to be a high-speed expressway, and even if we had been able to find an entrance to it, we had no idea where it went.

Our compasses were already proving a necessity, for the chaotic layout of the city made us lose all sense of direction. Even watching the sun did not seem to help. No sooner would we see some landmark in the distance and make towards it, than it would vanish behind other buildings, and later reappear in an unexpected direction. It took more than an hour to travel ten miles, and I fear that we were then no more than a mile from our starting point. I could have wished for a GPS locator, but at the time we made this journey, such devices were still bulky and expensive.

We paused to rest, sitting at the side of a "road".

"What are we looking at?" said Kado.

"What do you mean?"

"Look around. Which of these buildings are shops? Which of them are residences? Do you recognise offices? Factories? Bars? What are the people around us doing? Why are there hardly any cars?"

I looked. The more I looked, the less sense I could make of the scene. One or two establishments I could guess were shops, though from a distance it was not clear what they were selling. Ahuan shops do not have window displays. But the remainder were obscure. It was not that they were shuttered from the outside; on the contrary, doors stood open and windows uncurtained. It was more that they offered too much information, and all of it conflicting. I felt dizzy, as I had done at the quayside. I closed my eyes and concentrated on the simple, understandable sensations of my own body until the fit had passed. I looked at Kado, and I could see that his greater experience of this place had not rendered him immune. We had barely penetrated any distance into this country, and already the strain was telling on us.

By nightfall it was clear that we would not be out of the city until the next day. We began to consider where we might spend the night, for the difficulties of availing ourselves of a hotel were obvious (if indeed anything resembling such an establishment existed in this country), while it was clearly out of the question to pitch a tent anywhere.

In the end we decided to simply press on. Although here and there some source of light would briefly illuminate our path, there was no street lighting as such. This actually made our progress easier, as we could no longer see the incomprehensibilities of the day, and could concentrate on simply not hitting anything within the range of our lights. It was about midnight when we realised that we were no longer surrounded by buildings.

It was a cloudless night, but the moon was low in the sky, and we could only dimly sense the surrounding topography. There was a low, conical hill a few miles further on. We made for it, with the intention of camping there to gain a better view of where we were the next morning...