No one was waiting for Timar, no one inspected his bags. He walked along the concrete pier and flagged down a truck that brought him straight to the Central, the only hotel in town. Its five rooms were empty most of the year. When the lumberjacks came down to the coast on business they ate and drank at the Central. But when bedtime came they would cross the street, stagger into a hut, slip the man of the house a few francs, shoo him away and crawl onto the mat beside his wife. Newcomers stayed at the Central, but only until they adopted the lumberjacks' habits. Timar was from La Rochelle. At the age of twenty-three he believed what innumerable young Europeans had believed before him: that he could make it in the wilderness by putting his shoulder to the wheel. He wasn't afraid of jungle diseases, and he hoped to find a respectable way to make money out there, hand over fist. That respectability had been pounded into him: he'd been raised by his mother and an older sister, and they had made him so incredibly respectable that it was to be his undoing.