I'm hypnotized by the sight of a darkly beautiful guerrilla rinsing her hair in the creek. She squeezes it out, dips it again, squeezes and dips, as if she could do this for just as long as she wants, as if the world would pause while gravity slowly pulled the water from around her legs, drained it down the muddy creek, into the Caguan River, and then into the Amazon, and finally, one day, into the Atlantic beyond.

There's a whistle, and it's not a wolf whistle. It's the sentry in charge of the roadblock. "You!" he barks, and gestures me up the hill.

There are two female guerrillas on duty as well; the male sentry is shorter than either woman. "Who are you?" he demands. A journalist, I tell him, stuttering badly. I don't remember exactly what he says; he just yells at me. I'm sweating badly, stuttering worse, and I can't for the life of me recall the name of the town where I just was. This is panic.

"What town?" he shouts when I can't remember. "You are lying!"

He makes me angry. Suddenly I can speak Spanish again. I begin talking, a steady stream of complete nonsense about how I'm on my way to interview his commander right now and I had better not be late. I hand him an ancient photocopy of my passport and keep talking. I'm interviewing the Monkey in thirty minutes; I rattle off the names of different commanders, anything I can think of to keep him busy.

Meanwhile a pickup truck pulls into the roadblock, and the female guerrillas look over the passengers, check the driver's papers, and then lower the chain to let it pass. I'm still talking, describing my close friendship with the Monkey and my upcoming book about Simon Trinidad, but I catch the driver's eye, hopeful, and he nods. Without ever ceasing to talk I step up into the bed of the truck, and the driver suddenly hits the gas, hard. We roll over the resting chain, sprint down the hill, and are out of sight. The whole episode is over in ninety seconds.

The last thing I see is the short guerrilla standing in the middle of the road, watching us disappear, the faded photocopy in one hand, the rifle in the other.

The appearance of sunshine in Bogota is a rare event, considered news in the local papers and fiction in the works of Garcia Marquez. I return through a haze to the Street of Sighs, dodging some war refugees in the same little plaza on my way into the hotel.

Maybe it is the altitude, or maybe the damp Andean chill, or maybe something else, but immediately on arrival a fever lashes through my body, confining me to bed. I shiver for two days and watch the peace negotiations on live television. Peace activists, union organizers, crackpots, students, and a government delegation all arrive at The Wells, and the Thematics take the stage in the peace shed. Different civilians get five minutes each to propose schemes for rebuilding Colombia--the construction of a huge new city from scratch in the deep jungle; or guaranteed employment for everyone; or the proper use of parapsychology; or nationalizing all the industries, all the farmland, and all the water, oil, minerals, and TV stations--but nobody is listening to anybody else. It is a dialogue of the deaf, a spectacle without substance. Simon Trinidad sits gravely on the platform in the shed, nodding like a branch manager, thanking people, asking them to keep it to five minutes. At one point, the aged Sureshot staggers in, dressed for golf and looking like he couldn't scratch a barn with a bazooka. He listens for ten minutes, and then staggers back out to shouts of "VIVA!"

On the second day in the hotel room, still sweating, I catch a short news item about some mothers who have taken over a local church. Colombia has the worst kidnapping rate in the world, and the mothers are demanding the release of their sons. I jot down the name of the church, eat two aspirin, and ride a taxi into a vast, poor neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. Beggars chase me into the sanctuary, where I find about sixty of the mothers. They are very poor women from small towns and farmlands around Colombia. Each wears a shirt or a placard with a photo of her son, his name, and when and where he was taken hostage. It doesn't matter why he was taken hostage, or by whom. Most of the boys were Colombian army draftees captured by FARC in battle, but there are also mothers of boys who are being held by the ELN guerrillas, by the right-wing death squads, or by criminal syndicates, which kidnap people and then sell the captives to any group that needs ransom money. The mothers have bedrolls, plastic jugs of water, and cheap aluminum pots filled with rice. They've decorated the place with signs addressed to MR. PRESIDENT or GENTLEMEN OF THE GOVERNMENT or DEAR SURESHOT, always pleading for the release of their sons and an end to the endless war.

I'm in the church for hours, sitting on the floor, talking with the women, photographing their brown, weathered faces, the full panorama of Latin American despair hidden in every set of eyes. They hunch over transistor radios, tuned to the negotiations in the peace shed, wondering if Simon Trinidad or anyone will say the word "amnesty." Each of these women has a hope: Maybe my son will come home soon. Maybe he will escape this nightmare.

I start thinking about the roadblock while I'm in there, and eventually I have to leave, because I start sobbing. Or maybe it is the faces of these women. Or maybe it is the fever, breaking.

The next day I notice an item buried on page six of a Bogota paper: "NORTHEAST REMAINS CUT OFF." Guerrillas from Colombia's other major group, the ELN, have isolated three towns in the northeast flatlands by "flying" the nearest bridges. (This is the Colombian expression for blowing them up.) The most threatened of the three is an oil center on the Magdalena River called Sandbanks (Barrancabermeja). ELN troops have cut all the roads into Sandbanks and even closed the river to traffic by firing on relief boats. The city is already packed with war refugees--the population has doubled to 300,000 in the last few years--and with prices rising, residents are starting to hoard food.

"The only manner of entering or leaving Sandbanks is by air travel," the paper says. In the morning I buy a ticket and fly in."You've come to sun yourself?" the taxi driver from the airport asks. Sandbanks is famous for its relentless sunshine, but as we go through the town the hazy overcast is complete. At the weedy central plaza I jump out to investigate a large solar clock. As I suspected, it is no time at all here.