Just off Place Belle Cours, an impromptu rally of Iranian supporters is under way even though the game doesn’t kick off for eight hours. “I-ran! I-ran!” is the chant interspersed with drumbeats and whistles. Supporters eating at the canopied McDonald’s next door join in.

Then a considerably smaller crew of Americans starts its own, “U-S-A! U-S-A!” The two groups try to outshout each other at first, then join together to cheer “I-ran! USA! I-ran! USA!” It’s a genuine moment. But the volume of shouting increases about three notches when nearby TV crews take notice.

An Iranian woman approaches. “You are reporter?” she asks. Her name is Narges (she’s unwilling to provide a last name). Her family moved to Stockholm to escape the ayatollah in ’78. Regarding today’s match, she says: “It’s not just a match. It’s about freedom, our time and our country. For U.S., we don’t have anything against U.S. It is important that world see us. It’s worse than you think. We love our team and we love our players but we want freedom for our people. We are here for democracy and more than 100,000 executed and 150,000 in prison. It is the point, not the game.”

What about Khatami, Iran’s new, more moderate president, who in recent months has made peace overtures to the United States? Narges tells me, “He is bad man.” She was a student when he was the cultural minister and he was “bad for students,” she says.

It seems that most of the Iranian supporters in Lyon today have traveled from Western European countries, not Iran. That’s true, says Narges, because most Iranians living there cannot afford to travel, but there are members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard here as well. She forcefully takes me by the elbow, pulls me to the corner and points to a white minivan covered with Iran posters parked across the street. All its doors are open and men are passing out green, white and red visors and Iran T-shirts. “There,” she says. “That is Iranian embassy van.”

One of the white van men is Mohammed Said, who does, in fact, live in Iran. He quickly notices that I don’t have an official press credential but seems willing to talk anyway. What does he think of all the politics involved in this match? “I don’t think you can send a message with this match. It is a little different but it won’t be the change of position between Iran and U.S.” Should that relationship change? “I think it should change but not because of this.” And what about the thousands of Iranians who have traveled from Western European countries to state their opposition to the current government? He claims not to have seen them.

But perhaps not everyone has politics on his mind. Amir Ghahani is hanging out near the white van as well. He lives in San Diego and tells me: “I lived in Iran when the shah was in power. I support the team and the culture, not the government. I’m not going to go into the stadium cheering, ‘I support the Islamic Republic of Iran.’ I just support Iran.”

A band of 15 chanting Iran supporters marches into the dusty center of Place Belle Cours. There they find Nathan Max of Washington, D.C., a young man wearing a U.S. flag around his head and a national team T-shirt. A busty young Iranian woman in a tight gray tank top strikes up a flirtatious conversation with him. The crowd of supporters encircles them. She asks if he’s ever kissed an Iranian girl and the crowd erupts. By now, several photojournalists have arrived.

Nathan blushes a little, then enthusiastically tries to take her up on what sounded like an offer. But she’s too embarrassed and demurs. After two or three failed attempts, a middle-aged man wearing an Iranian flag steps forward and plants a big wet one on Nathan’s cheek. The two share a bear hug. Click, flash, wind, the cameras snap away.

A great photo op has been had but Nathan still wants one on the lips from the voluptuous young lady. “Please,” he begs, “in the name of peace!”

“Piece of what?” someone yells.

“Piece of ass!” he replies.

The crowd bursts into laughter.

In one corner of the square an Iran fan has knotted his flag to that of an American supporter. Five photojournalists shoot away. One holds out two fingers with his left hand as his right handles a Nikon. The subjects take the hint; they make peace signs and smile.

All through the afternoon Iran fans toot horns, bang drums, chant and cheer their way up and down Rue de la Republique, Lyon’s main drag. It’s a beautiful, car-free promenade, and the noise echoes off the building walls. In a wide square about a kilometer up the road from Place Belle Cours, fans frolic in a giant open fountain. In the middle, a pile of McDonald’s containers, Kronenborg beer cans and other flotsam and jetsam has sunk to the bottom.

On one of the side streets, two dozen or so Americans are drinking beers out of pint-sized plastic cups outside Bar & Bihres. In Europe, singing is an integral part of the football fan’s experience. But we Americans, though we know how to cheer and chant, don’t really understand the concept of nationalistic songs. The folks on the street try a round of “Oli,” the world’s simplest and most popular soccer song, but can’t quite get it in key. Then a Scottish fellow who’s been drinking with the group leads a round of “We’re the Tartan Army.” After that they belt out “Do-Ray-Me” from “The Sound of Music” and then “Frhre-Jacques.” No doubt about it: If the U.S. is to become a soccer superpower, we need some better fight songs.

As thousands walk toward the stadium entrance, the feeling is electric, as if
we all know something extraordinary is going to happen. After an extensive
security check during which all bodies are frisked and all bags are carefully
searched, we make our way to our seats.

Mine is in Escalier D, directly behind the Iran goal. Already, the noise
level is simply astonishing. There are 20 minutes to kickoff and I
cannot hear what a fan directly next to me says, even when he yells. Keep in
mind that this is an open stadium. There is no roof for the
noise to bounce off as in, say, Madison Square Garden or the Kingdome.
Drums bang away, whistles are blaring. Some guy’s got a pair of 20-inch
cymbals that he continually bashes together. Fans are standing on their
seats, yelling at the top of their lungs. It’s complete bedlam.

A distant cry of “USA, USA,” is barely audible. The vast majority of the fans
are here to support Iran in one way or another, but the factions within that
group are hard to disentangle. The largest seems to consist of supporters of
the Mujahadeen, an army of rebels that opposes the current Iranian government.
I say “seems” because it is hard to distinguish these folks from those who
simply hate the government but don’t necessarily support the Mujahadeen.

Those Mujahadeen supporters dominate my section of the stands and the sections
to the right as well. Many are wearing T-shirts with pictures of leaders
Maryam and Mashood Rajavi surrounded by fluorescent green or orange, designed
for maximum televisibility. Old women with cloaks over their heads, children,
men, everyone wears these shirts and they are screaming, really screaming, “I-ran! Ra-ja-vi! I-ran! Ra-ja-vi!” This is a massive political protest. It
just happens to be taking place at a soccer game.

As the band plays Iran’s national anthem, my section sings a different Persian
nationalist song, again with all their strength. The result is a cacophony of
disjointed tunes.

Moments before kickoff a large pink balloon floats ever so gently off the
balcony above toward the playing field. From it hangs a banner with a picture
of Maryam Rajavi. The Iranian players have just completed their warm-ups and
are heading into a pregame huddle as the balloon drifts by, no more than 10
yards away. Those around me go absolutely berserk. The referee walks over,
grabs this ingenious political statement and removes it from the field.

Finally, at long last, the game gets under way. The Americans dominate early
but it is of no matter to the masses. The extraordinary din continues at the
same volume, regardless of the action on the field. Unlike at any normal
sporting event, the crowd noise never lulls, not for one instant. Near me, a
man holds a red, white and green flag much like the official flag of Iran –
except there is a lion on the white middle stripe. “This is Iran before
ayatollah. They took this flag and put that crap on it,” he says, pointing to
the Islamic symbol on the official flag. He says he paid 800 pounds for his
ticket to some scalper in London. He says there’s an army of 30,000
Mujahadeen troops massed on the border of Iran waiting to invade. He says
he’s here to show solidarity with them.

What is striking about the general mayhem is that it seems to lack any
specific anti-American sentiment. No “Down with the Great Satan” signs
anywhere. No anti-USA chants. Iranian fans are even relatively polite during
the playing of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” As many tell me, they are here
first and foremost to support their team, the representatives of their
nation.

About 35 minutes into the first half, the Iranians score the first goal of the
game. The stadium explodes. All around me people hug, kiss, dance, weep. It
is a miracle, a moment of indescribable national pride. Now if they can just
hold that lead.

During halftime, supporters turn their attention from the action on the field
to each other. From the balcony above us hangs a banner supporting the
current regime. Those on my terrace turn their backs to the field and chant
up at them, “Down with Khatami! Down with Khatami!” for a full 15 minutes
until the game restarts.

FIFA, the international soccer body that runs the World Cup, forbids overt
political statements at Cup matches (a truly absurd rule). Throughout the
first half supporters in Escalier D raised aloft large fluorescent banners
that read, “Down with Khatami” only to have security personnel confiscate them. In the second half, they wise up. When stadium guards come
to one end of the section, a banner is balled up and tossed from fan to fan
safely out of reach, then unfurled again. Upping the ante, the stadium calls
in what appears to be a SWAT team of French national police. Each wears all
black, including intimidating combat boots, and carries a crowd control billy
club. These young toughs wrestle the banners out of the hands of old Muslim
women, even children. A good deal of scuffling is involved as fans try to
stop them. During one excellent scoring chance for Iran, supporters are
distracted by a commotion in the section adjacent to us. A fan is landing a
solid right hand to someone’s head as the SWAT team descends. He is quickly
pinned down and removed by security.

Buried deep within the mayhem of Escalier D are Eric Mason of New York and
Andrea North of Dallas, the lone red, white and blue supporters in a sea of
red, white and green. They seem rather shaken but not scared enough to leave
their seats. “It’s pretty cool. It’s history-making. I’m standing in a
bunch of Iranians,” Andrea says.

With about 15 minutes to go, the Iranians score again to go up 2-0. There is
now no doubt Iran will win and the stadium reaches a new, previously
unimagined, fever pitch. In the midst of it all I snap two pictures of two
Muslim women dressed in conservative religious wear as they embrace in joy.
When traveling in Middle Eastern countries, it is extremely inconsiderate to
photograph a woman wearing a chador without securing permission. But women who were
similarly dressed and were taking part in the Rajavi protest had encouraged me to shoot
away. It suddenly becomes apparent that these two are not a part of that
faction of supporters.

One of them is pushing me, screaming, “Pourquoi? Pourquoi!
Pourquoi!!” A security guard has seen what happens and he too starts yelling
at me in French, demanding to see some ID, shoving me. I have no official
press credential and my ticket was bought scalped. To avoid getting kicked
out of the game (or perhaps something worse), I open the camera, rip out the
film and hand it to the woman. That seems to calm things enough for me
to apologize and make a quick escape. A few minutes later I realize that during
the commotion my pen got jabbed fairly deeply into my hand. I’m sitting amid
thousands of insane Iranian soccer fans licking blood off my fingers.

With five minutes left, 100 SWAT team members walk onto the playing pitch
behind the goal line and stand facing our section as if to say, “Don’t even
think about storming the field.” The game ends and the Iranian players come
running over to Escalier D, jumping for joy. The mutual admiration is clear
and doesn’t last long. After only two minutes, the coach leads the players
away from the stands back to the dressing room, perhaps concerned about their
exposure to seditious elements.

The fans roll out of the stadium, dancing for joy. But the hostility between
factions is still apparent. One man kisses his official team jersey and
swears at the Mujahadeen supporters for ruining the match with their political
protest. His friends drag him away. It makes you wonder what might have
happened had the team suffered a humiliating loss.

Outside the stadium, I catch up with Patrice and Mike McGinnis, two very
disappointed-looking American fans. What did they think of the chaos in the
stands? “I was afraid,” Patrice confesses. “I didn’t want to be a victim.
We’re here on vacation.” They had asked security guards to move them to different
seats.

No doubt about it, the atmosphere within the stadium tonight was electric and
definitely on edge. But although there was plenty of hostility among
Iranians themselves and between Iran supporters and the police, there seemed
to be little aimed at the USA. Perhaps that’s because our team played so
badly — who knows?

Whatever the case, many of these folks seem openly to embrace American
culture. Amid the chaos of the postgame street party, one Iran fan
approaches me. After making eating gestures, he asks in very broken English,
“Where is McDonald?” I have no idea.

The weather is sunny, but ominous storm clouds occasionally roll by. On this hallowed ground, where the blood of French men and women flowed during 18th century revolutionary purges, rowdy Scottish soccer fans are staging a massive outdoor party. It is a sea of blue and white. Here and there some Brazilian yellow can be seen.

A group of 10 fans has just arrived and laid out an enormous Scottish flag for use as a picnic blanket. On the cross where the flag’s white lines intersect, they plunk down four cases of Foster’s Lager “oil cans” (the 20-ounce monsters). It’s a picnic of sorts, but there’s only one thing on the menu: beer.

Everywhere are overweight, red-faced men in kilts, many with their faces painted blue and white. One volunteers to demonstrate to a Brazilian television crew just how little Scots wear under those wool coverings. As he bends over, the cameraman comes in for what must be a frightening close-up of a bare male ass. One can only wonder what the folks back home in Rio are thinking.

Another kilted fan scales one of the bronzed green statues that line L’Hotel. Straddling its shoulders, he grasps a beer with one hand and waves a large Scottish flag with the other. From 15 feet above the square he yells, “Fuck England!” The masses below cheer their support. He spies five French gendarmes approaching and lets out an equally hearty “Vive la France!” to laughs and cheers.

The World Cup is here and the mood is nothing short of ecstatic. It’s loud. It’s raucous. It’s almost out of control. But it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. And the game hasn’t even started.

Into the second half, the Scottish team appears to be holding its own against a far superior Brazilian side. Storm clouds are gathering over Paris and the putrid smell of beer dried into cement is growing stronger by the minute.

Suddenly, the chants and songs cease as all eyes focus on the screen in a moment of wonder. There is Brazilian striker Ronaldo, 20 feet tall on the Jumbotron, the ball at his feet, smoothly dancing his way around one, then two, then three, then four Scottish defenders in a super slo-mo replay. Scotland’s big sweeper Colin Hendry (whose long blond locks make him look like he should have been an extra in “Braveheart”) has been spun around so many times that he looks like a dog trying to catch his own tail. He’s running with his back to Ronaldo, looking over his shoulder, trying to figure out which way to turn.

Ronaldo makes it look so easy. As he coolly dodges and weaves past the opposition, he appears remarkably confident and composed. The clip seems to last 10 minutes and leaves even the Scots speechless, if only for a moment.

A few minutes later, the Scottish team is cursed with a bit of terrible luck. After a Brazilian shot on goal, the ball bounces mistakenly off defender Jimmy Floyd’s shoulder toward his own net. Hendry desperately tries to stop it from rolling in, but he can’t get there in time. Cries of despair rise into the storm-laden Paris air. Some fans curse; others weep. Scotland’s moment in the sun has passed. They are now down, 2-1.

Satisfied simply to hold their lead, the Brazilians play keep-away and let the clock run out. When the final whistle blows, the kilted crowd around me is disappointed but also proud. “We gave ‘em a good run for their money!” one of the Foster’s group proclaims.

As if on cue, the sky lets loose with a tremendous downpour, and any further festivities are washed out. Hundreds of us swoop into the nearest Metro stop. The first game of France ’98 is history.

ON BOARD THE TGV, June 12: I’m whizzing through France at 150 mph bound for Marseille for the evening match between France and South Africa. This will be South Africa’s first-ever World Cup game, having been banned from the tournament for the last 28 years due to apartheid. Soccer has long been the sport of choice for the country’s black population, but under apartheid, they were not permitted to play with whites. Instead, “colored” leagues, much like U.S. baseball’s Negro Leagues of yesteryear, were formed. These days the team known as Bafana Bafana, or “the boys,” consists primarily of black players. I’m hoping to find a South African fan with whom I can chat about race relations, the politics of football in that country, etc.

As the French countryside blurs by, I head back to the cafe car for a beer and meet Gary, a transplanted South African who lives in London. He’s already been traveling for five hours. He caught the train at Waterloo and is headed straight for Marseille.

Gary’s got sad eyes and a somewhat droopy face. He seems to be a nice, thoughtful fellow. He even went to college in the United States on a soccer scholarship at North Texas State (“We were No. 11 nationwide,” he offers). We make plans to share a cab together from the station to the game when we arrive in Marseille. Now that I’ve found an interesting pal for my story, I return to my seat for some shut-eye.

When we arrive in Marseille two hours later, Gary stumbles out of the train, arms draped across two Englishmen. He swigs from an open can of beer in one hand, while grasping a closed one in the other. As we head toward the taxi stand, he and his English mates start loudly singing Tottenham Hotspur fight songs. He’s drunk off his ass and he’s expecting me to get him to the game. So much for uncovering the profound meaning of South Africa’s first appearance in the World Cup.

After Gary takes some cash out of a bank machine and nearly loses his wallet, we hop in a cab. Immediately our driver tries to sell us tickets to the match. He’s asking only about 10 pounds over face value and Gary’s amazed.

As the streets of Marseille go flying by, Gary yells out the window at every female within earshot. He and the driver strike up a conversation in Franglais about the women of Marseille. The driver bridges the communication gap by sticking his right index finger through the circle his thumb and index finger on his left hand have formed. Gary lets out a hearty laugh.

I ditch my South African comrade once we arrive at the grounds and soon find my seat inside Le Stade Velodrome. Behind me sits a row of 10 college-age males, all with red, white and blue French flags painted on their faces. They’ve got the air of American frat boys, but they’re thinner and much better looking. One or two could double as Tommy Hilfiger models.

These are very, very loud French fans, first bellowing out the French national anthem, then leading the chants: “Allez, allez, allez!” or “Allez les bleus, allez les bleus!” There are some variations on these, but it seems that every French cheer involves the word allez (“go”) and les bleus (the national team’s nickname because of the blue color of its uniforms).

The game starts and a chilling wind whips across the field. Though it’s the middle of June, it must be no more than 50 degrees out. The boys behind me scream, “Zizou, Zizou!” each time France’s central midfielder, Zinedine Zidane, touches the ball. In addition to being Marseille’s hometown hero, Zidane is far and away France’s most important player. He is their playmaker, their maestro.

To watch Zidane play live is sheer revelation. On a field far larger than the U.S. football gridiron, he is seemingly everywhere at once, controlling the game for his team. Slightly stoop-shouldered, with a large and growing bald spot, he seems an unlikely candidate to dominate any sport. But Zidane is blessed with tremendous balance and strength, and he possesses the most important attribute of any great playmaker — imagination. He creates scoring opportunities where none seem to exist. On the ball, he moves like a panther, head lowered, jersey often askew, bouncing and spinning off defenders. Suddenly, at just the right moment, he makes that improbable pass to spring a teammate into the clear, just behind the opponent’s defense. It’s the kind of pass that even good soccer players cannot imagine, let alone execute. He is a whirling dervish of soccer frenzy, a genius to behold.

All French roads to goal go through Zizou. He takes all the team’s corner kicks and most penalty kicks. More important, he runs the offense and organizes the defense. His importance to “les bleus” cannot be overestimated. If France is at long last to enter the World Cup holy land (the team has never done better than the semifinals), it will be Zidane who leads them there.

It is ironic that this brilliant athlete also happens to be the son of Algerian parents. Though Algerian, Tunisian, Moroccan and Senegalese immigrants play an increasingly important role in France, many French do not welcome them, and signs of racism are not difficult to uncover. The fans behind me are a good example: I return to my seat several minutes after the second half has begun, forcing the two Moroccan immigrant French teens in the seats next to me to stand so I can pass. The three of us temporarily block the view of the French frat boys. These same fans who earlier had called Zidane’s nickname with such admiration now holler at the three of us: “Asseyez-vous!” and, because they know I am American, “Sit down!” Then one of them yells some gibberish in mimicked Arabic. It’s an insult clearly aimed at the two Moroccan-French boys, and his friends laugh, albeit a bit sheepishly.

The game ends 3-0 for France. I run out of the stadium, board the Metro and head back to the train station, catching the 1 a.m. TGV to Paris. By 7 a.m I am fast asleep in the comfort of a friend’s apartment on Boulevard Port Royal.

PARIS, June 13: Parisians seem generally unfazed by World Cup hoopla. During several lolls through the cinquième arrondisement I’ve found quiet acknowledgment of the event but not much downright enthusiasm.

I’ve just wandered into the Cafe du Port Royal to watch Spain take on Nigeria. The restaurant has strung the flags of the 32 Cup participants in the entryway (these seem to be standard issue for every eating and drinking establishment in the city). But only a small TV atop the dessert cooler broadcasts the game. A teenager on roller skates smokes and bangs away on “The Addams Family” pinball machine in the corner. A haggard old woman sits with her back to the television, chain-smoking and eating quiche. The bartender is engrossed in his dishwashing. Other patrons seem content to stare out the window at yet another cold, damp day.

Suddenly Raul, Spain’s Wunderkind striker, blasts a scorching shot past Nigeria’s goalkeeper. As the announcers crow about a spectacular goal, no one in the cafe looks up. Welcome to World Cup fever, Paris-style. At moments like this it seems hard to believe that thousands of Bangladeshis have been rioting for three days because power outages have prevented them from watching Cup matches.

But that is not to say that Paris has not found its own unique way of exploiting Cup excitement. A recent ad in the city’s weekly entertainment circular Pariscope translates roughly as follows:

“Come see the Moulin Rouge Stadium featuring a 70-square-meter screen.

“The Moulin Rouge invites you to experience the 16 matches of the final phase of the World Cup in a unique place, the uncontested symbol of France. Tingle as if you were there for the sporting event of the year. And admire the 60 Doriss Girls and their celebrated French can-can as they make the third half of the game unforgettable.

“It promises to be a great moment for Football and an excellent evening.

“Cover Price for Le Match Finale: 2,000 francs”

If I stumble across $330, my next report will be ringside from the Moulin Rouge!

It isn’t realistic to suggest that soccer will soon, if ever, be as big in the American spectator-sports pantheon as baseball, basketball or football. (Supplanting hockey, another imported niche sport that may be wearing out its welcome, is another matter.) But “America’s soccer nation,” to borrow a phrase from George Vecsey of the New York Times, has grown extraordinarily broad and diverse, stretching from immigrant-rich urban hotbeds like East Los Angeles and Newark, N.J., to middle-class strongholds around Portland, Ore., and Dallas-Fort Worth. As the planet’s attention turns to France this week for the opening of the 1998 World Cup — where the hot topics are striking airline workers, Algerian terrorists, English hooligans and a gap-toothed kid named Ronaldo from the slums outside Rio — it’s worth recognizing how far American soccer has come.

Major League Soccer, the 12-team U.S. pro league that arose in the wake of World Cup ’94, is a weird, low-rent affair in many ways. It has made several lamentable rule changes in an effort to make the game more comprehensible to non-fans, and its team names (the Dallas Burn? the San Jose Clash?) seem lifted from some marketing student’s MBA thesis. But MLS continues to draw respectable crowds in near-total media obscurity (the league-wide attendance average is about 14,000 per game). More importantly, its level of play has improved dramatically. If you’re one of the soccer snobs who spurned the league for its Madison Avenue cheese factor, or who gave up during its often-laughable first season, I strongly advise you not to miss this year’s edition of the Los Angeles Galaxy — a slashing, high-scoring team of speed burners who combine South American flair with North American grit. Professional competition at this improved level has in turn toughened and sharpened the U.S. national team, previously an unstable mix of foreign-based players and near-amateurs.

The American team that will play Germany in Paris on Monday is by far the best ever to represent this country, a tirelessly athletic side that plays sound positional and tactical soccer and doesn’t surrender goals easily. Its accomplishments over the last year have been impressive: The Americans held Mexico to a goalless draw in a crucial qualifying match before an enormous, enraged crowd at the high altitude of Mexico City; rode red-hot goalkeeper Kasey Keller to an astonishing 1-0 win over world champion Brazil; and thoroughly dominated Austria in a 3-0 victory in Vienna. Unfortunately for them, expectations were unfairly raised by the far less talented and interesting ’94 squad, which snuck into the round of 16 on a fluke, after a Colombian defender put the ball into his own net. (He was later murdered, perhaps by drug lords, in apparent retribution for his mistake.) In addition, this year’s team must play two of the most talented sides in Europe, Germany and Yugoslavia (the name still officially used by Slobodan Milosevic’s Serbian government), and two of its games may be drowned in political hype: When the U.S. plays Iran on June 21, it will mark the first significant athletic competition between the two since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Yugoslavia game on June 25 will undoubtedly be tinged by tensions over the Serbs’ latest round of atrocities in the Kosovo region. In short, for all the team’s improvement, it will take a bigger miracle than ’94′s to get them out of the first round. Soccer, like life, is full of injustice.

To return to our agonized Buddhist for a moment, any honest soccer fan will admit that the finale of USA ’94 was a prodigious anticlimax. After 120 minutes of scoreless, tentative play in the championship (a 90-minute game plus a half-hour of overtime), the phlegmatic Italian star Roberto Baggio — yes, a Zen practitioner — missed the last penalty kick in the tie-breaking shootout, giving the trophy to Brazil. A potentially classic matchup between the two most skillful soccer teams in the world had fizzled out in a grotesque blunder.

But perhaps even that was instructive. More than most sports, this one traffics in heartbreak and disappointment, and, all things considered, world soccer came back from its American vacation stronger and healthier than it had been in years. Friendly, enthusiastic crowds and modern facilities made the deadly stadium collapses and violent tribal outbreaks of European soccer’s recent past fade into memory, and the style of play (aside from the championship game) was mostly freewheeling and attractive, free of the choppy, defensive slog often encountered at the sport’s top levels. Indeed, the soccer establishment gathers in France secure in the knowledge that its game has, if anything, grown dramatically in exposure and popularity in the intervening four years.

Europe and Latin America have produced an exciting new generation of star players, foremost among them Ronaldo, the 21-year-old Brazilian who has almost certainly replaced Michael Jordan as the planet’s most famous athlete. The top professional leagues — the English Premier League, Germany’s Bundesliga, Italy’s Serie A and the Spanish Primera Liga — have begun to see themselves as leaders of a global industry, recruiting players from all continents and broadcasting their games by satellite around the world. A European super-league, involving such elite teams as Arsenal (London), Manchester United, A.C. Milan, Juventus (Turin), Bayern Munich and Real Madrid, is expected to emerge within a few years. And soccer fever is spreading rapidly through the densely populated nations of East Asia and sub-Saharan Africa — the 2002 World Cup will be shared by Japan and South Korea, with the 2006 tournament probably destined for South Africa.

It’s impossible to exaggerate the effect the Cup will have on daily life in most of the 32 countries represented at France ’98. Ordinary business will slow to a crawl for most of the next four weeks, and stop altogether whenever the national team is actually playing. (As many as 2 billion people, or one-third of the world’s population, are expected to watch the World Cup final on July 12. The National Basketball Association finals, perhaps Jordan’s final showcase, should top out at around 600 million viewers.) As for the U.S., well, as I say, we’re a lot more soccer-friendly than we used to be. The Disney-owned ABC/ESPN combo will broadcast every minute of every World Cup match live, a first for American TV. (Even during USA ’94, some games were only available on tape-delay.) Ratings will be somewhere north of the National Hockey League, but nowhere near “Seinfeld”/Super Bowl levels. In practice, if you walk into a sports bar in a major city, the Cup will probably be on — unless there’s a baseball game opposite it on another channel.

My private theory is that there is in fact a cryptic, matter/antimatter relationship between baseball and soccer — that the space soccer occupies in the souls of (male) Europeans and South Americans is filled, in norteamericanos, by baseball. This theory, I believe, can even account for the anomalous cases of Japan and Mexico, where both sports are widely popular: In each of those countries, American influence has ground like a tectonic plate against underlying and in some ways opposing traditions, producing a tense, peculiar cultural mélange.

Superficially, no two sports could be more different. Soccer at least bears certain formal similarities to football (11 players a side, with each team defending a goal on a rectangular field) and basketball (which also combines positional strategy with fluid, improvisational play). But football and basketball are modern inventions, whereas baseball and soccer developed deep in the rural, pre-industrial past before being codified in the mid-19th century. An early version of baseball was played in both England and colonial America; the game is mentioned, of all places, in Jane Austen’s 1796 novel “Northanger Abbey.” Along with cricket, its posh English cousin, baseball presumably descends from stick-and-ball games played by medieval shepherds (the legend that Abner Doubleday invented it in 1839 in Cooperstown, N.Y., has been convincingly rejected). Soccer is older still; it can be directly traced to a game played by the Roman legions in Gaul, and similar games were played much earlier by the Assyrians, Egyptians and ancient Chinese. Amusingly, a historical article published by the National Soccer Hall of Fame explains that by the 12th century in England, “the game had become a violent mob sport with no rules and any sort of behavior condoned” — not much has changed on the Sceptered Isle, evidently, in 800 years.

As befits such bucolic ancientness, both sports are deeply concerned with history and tradition. Both reward the obsessive, the purist, the acolyte far more than the casual observer. Both have childishly simple objectives — touch all four bases; put this ball in that net without using your hands — yet require almost impossible feats of athleticism and coordination, and seem to their devotees to be possessed of almost mystical depth. Both create a highly elastic sense of time, although in entirely different ways. Baseball, of course, is the only major team sport (besides cricket) that has no clock, and a single inning may take anywhere from two minutes to an hour or more. Soccer, although divided into 45-minute halves, is played in a nearly continuous flow of patterns that form, break down and reassemble, mesmerizing its fans into a kind of high-anxiety fugue state; add to this the fact that official time is kept only by the referee (except in the new and improved MLS), so players and fans never know exactly how much time remains.

Let’s be frank — another connection between these sports is that both bore nonbelievers out of their skulls. There’s no mystery to this, and it’s not solely a matter of incomprehension. All sports torture their fans in various ways, and both baseball and soccer do so with extended periods of stultifying tedium. “Fever Pitch,” English novelist Nick Hornby’s marvelously funny memoir about his lifelong obsession with the London team Arsenal, is full of self-recriminating accounts of all the atrocious matches he’s sat through. Hornby refers to soccer as a form of “entertainment as pain,” and writes that “the natural state of the [soccer] fan is bitter disappointment.” But boredom and irritation are part of a fan’s ritual allegiance to the sport; as though bargaining with the Old Testament God, we believe we must suffer through the bad games to deserve the brilliant ones.

This isn’t the place to discuss the kind of 8-2 baseball game that suddenly stops dead around the sixth inning and devolves into the kind of timeless nothingness otherwise achieved only in Wagner’s “Parsifal.” But I can assure you that among the 48 first-round matches of this year’s World Cup, there will be at least one or two deadly dull contests in which neither team will make any serious effort to score goals. (There is indeed such a thing as an exciting 0-0 draw in soccer, but we’ll leave that for the advanced lesson.) There will be several more in which one team will score a lucky goal early, then pack eight or nine men in front of its own goal, punt the ball downfield without chasing it and ruthlessly chop down any opposing player who dares to foray forward. Fans of the teams involved will watch such games on tenterhooks, for they know that, as unlikely as it may seem, a sudden defensive miscue or a lightning strike from midfield could destabilize the whole mind-numbing equation. The souls who really deserve your pity are those who watch such games because they have no choice — those who, for example, will get up early Friday morning to watch Paraguay play Bulgaria, and who will do so without hope, without expectation, without passion, but simply because they must. (Don’t call me that morning — I’ll be, um, working.) There will also, I promise, be a game or two (or more, if we’re really lucky) in France ’98 that will become soccer lore. Games like the 1958 final in which a teenager named Pelé scored twice against Sweden and his astonishing Brazil team taught the world what il jogo bonito meant; or the 1986 quarterfinal in which Argentina’s mercurial superstar Diego Maradona called on “la mano de Dios” to defeat England and avenge his nation’s humiliation in the Falklands; or the cruel, cruel semifinal of 1982, when les bleus, the long-suffering French team, scored twice in overtime against arch rival West Germany, only to see the relentless Teutons storm back, hammer two home in the final minutes to tie, then win the penalty-kick shootout. And the thing is, there’s no way to be sure, absolutely sure, that Friday’s Paraguay-Bulgaria clash won’t be one of those.

In brilliant and dreadful games alike, the best way to decode the apparently amorphous flow of soccer is to make sense of the alignment of players on the field. With 22 players running around trying to deceive each other, there’s a certain degree of chaos theory involved in even the best-played games — but following the action is a lot easier if you can tell the accidental patterns from the intentional ones. The most common alignment in soccer is a defensive-minded setup called the 4-4-2, meaning that there are four defenders positioned in front of the goalkeeper, four midfielders seeking to control play in the center and two forwards hanging around the opponent’s goal hoping to score. If the team is leading, the four midfielders will drift backward, creating an eight-man defense; if the team needs a goal, they’ll move forward to help form a six-man attack. There are many variations on this theme; the one most relevant to American fans at the moment is the unorthodox 3-6-1 formation that U.S. coach Steve Sampson has developed for the World Cup, in an effort to cover up the Americans’ weaknesses and capitalize on their athletic ability and team speed.

One of the keys to this alignment is the tremendous confidence Sampson has in goalkeeper Keller, a Washington state native who has excelled for several seasons in the English Premier League. Whatever hope the Americans have for advancing in the tournament rests with the unflappable Keller, who made numerous impossible saves against Brazil in the stunning 1-0 U.S. win over the champs in February. That game alone made clear how much stronger the U.S. team has become. Playing against a 10-man Brazil team in the ’94 Cup, the Americans never came close to scoring; the only element of suspense was how long it would take the Brazilians to penetrate the U.S. defense. Today, with a little luck, the U.S. has a fighting chance against any side in the world.

Directly in front of Keller is 37-year-old Thomas Dooley, the German-born son of an American serviceman and veteran of nine seasons in the Bundesliga. As the sweeper, or central defender, and team captain, Dooley is supposed to take on any attacking players who break free near the goal, keep a cool head and distribute the ball out of the back. The other defenders, “marking backs” with specific assignments to guard, or “mark,” opposing forwards, will almost certainly be Eddie Pope and David Regis. Pope, a rising star in MLS with two-time champions D.C. United, is one of a modest but growing contingent of African-Americans in soccer. Regis is also black, but his story is completely different — a native of Martinique who stars for the Karlsruhe team in Germany, he became a U.S. citizen (through marriage) less than a month ago. These are two of the most talented players on the team, and will often come forward to join the attack; Pope is known for driving headers on goal, while Regis has a dangerous long-range shot.

Of Sampson’s six midfielders, two are really “wingers,” speedy players who dash up and down the flanks of the field from goal to goal, from defense to offense, as the action dictates. These roles will probably be filled by Cobi Jones, the lightning-quick Detroiter who has scored seemingly at will this year for the Los Angeles Galaxy, and Californian Frankie Hejduk of the Tampa Bay Mutiny, at 23 the youngest player on the team. The two most fixed slots on the field belong to the least experienced players, defensive midfielders Chad Deering and Brian Maisonneuve. Deering, a Texan who plays in Germany, and Maisonneuve, who plays for the Columbus Crew in MLS, will “stay home,” in coaching parlance — they should rarely be seen in the offensive zone (unless the team is behind in the late going), and must pick up defensive coverage if Pope or Regis go forward.

The most important offensive player on the American team is midfielder Claudio Reyna, a New Jersey native who plays with Deering at Wolfsburg in Germany. An agile ball-handler with speed and tremendous vision of the field, he plays a role similar to that of a basketball point guard — penetrating the defensive alignment and creating scoring chances for his teammates or himself. Reyna’s partner at offensive midfielder will probably be Ernie Stewart, the team’s best blend of skill and experience. Another military brat, Stewart was born and raised in the Netherlands, where he plays professionally for NAC Breda. That leaves the lone forward, or “striker,” who hangs around near the opponent’s goal, using up defenders’ energies and hoping a loose ball bounces his way. Sampson almost seems to use this position as a decoy — to some extent, this entire alignment is an effort to adjust for the team’s dearth of star strikers. Eric Wynalda, the career American scoring leader, is recovering from a knee injury and looks slow and rusty. Roy Wegerle, a 34-year-old South African immigrant who once played in England, is a hard-working journeyman who’s no longer a lethal scorer. Nonetheless, Wegerle may start, since Sampson seems to lack confidence in Brian McBride, who stars alongside Maisonneuve in Columbus but has had little success in international play.

The theory behind the 3-6-1 is that eight of the 10 field players will join the attack at some point — even Dooley is likely to come forward once or twice — and that all of them are capable of scoring. These flexible waves of Yanks pouring forward will eventually find cracks, Sampson hopes, even in the technically superb German defense. Meanwhile, all those young, agile bodies clogging up the midfield will frustrate the ponderous, tradition-bound attackers of Germany and Yugoslavia, dispossessing them of the ball and launching devastating counterattacks. You can’t fault Sampson for trying something new and ambitious; the U.S. team wasn’t going to beat Germany with slow-footed defenders Marcelo Balboa and Alexi Lalas — two World Cup vets now riding the bench — doggedly manning the back line. In fact, after Hejduk, McBride and Reyna scored in the impressive 3-0 victory over Austria in April, Sampson had his team and the American media momentarily convinced that he had the German behemoth measured for the kill.

Maybe he does: Sampson’s reign as the first American-born coach of the U.S. team has been characterized by uncanny good fortune when it’s most needed. But the fragility of his experimental alignment was exposed when Reyna missed a few games with minor injuries and the U.S. attack fired blanks against Macedonia and Scotland, while mistimed forward waves allowed dangerous scoring chances to opponents. By far the likeliest scenario is that the American team, which for all its speed and conditioning lacks basic ball-handling skills, will be dismantled by the powerhouse Germans and outgunned by the explosive Serbs. Sampson will face public displeasure and lose his job, a big-name foreign coach will be hired at great expense to build the 2002 team and American soccer will continue its slow, incremental build. But Sampson’s gamble is a worthy one. A cheap goal and a few outrageous saves from Kasey Keller on Monday evening in Paris, and the team with the funny formation — the implausible offspring, if you like, of soccer’s 1994 blind date with America — will make front-page headlines around the world.

At the time, the invitation sounded like the right thing to accept — a day-trip to Ile Ste. Marguerite, nearly uninhabited, rich in nature and history, a cool green spot in the arid terrain of the Maritime Alps. That all 90 pupils from the Icole Maternelle, ranging in age from 3 to 5, would be accompanying me didn’t sink in at the time. Or that such an invasion was enough to make D-Day look like amateur’s play.

Tina tugged at my arm as we disembarked from the ferry. In the month I had been staying with them, she already saw me as a member of the family. A permanent member, a second mother of sorts, one who was teaching her this strange new language, English.

Martine unhooked her from my sleeve. “Leave Roxanne,” she said. “She’s never been here. She wants to see the fort.”

Yes, there was a grand fort to behold, the sinister Fort Royal, where the infamous Man in the Iron Mask was imprisoned before being shipped off to the Bastille. His mask was actually velvet and not metal, his identity never revealed although speculation had it that he was the illegitimate brother of King Louis XIV, or even his twin. I’d lived and breathed French culture, history and language for the past three months and my circuits were overloaded with museums and cultural pursuits.

I had accepted Martine’s invitation to visit her in the south of France when school ended, looking forward to surf and relaxation on some of the world’s most famous beaches. But by the time my feet touched down on the Ctte d’Azur, summer was in full swing, with throngs of tourists crowding and trashing the beaches under a relentless July sun. Record-breaking heat broiled the fabled Riviera without mercy, and by 10 a.m., it was too uncomfortable to be out of doors.

The heat will break, Martine promised. And in the meanwhile, I found nirvana on Ile Ste. Marguerite. The dense forest of enormous eucalyptus trees and parasol pines provided blessed shade and solitude, and I longingly looked upon a trail leading away from the picnic site. It beckoned me, a dark passageway with only speckles of sun supplying the needed light.

I escaped after lunch, alone. My footsteps were the only ones along the dirt path; the woods were silent save for the wind rustling through the leaves and the occasional chatter of an unseen bird. Aside from the schoolchildren, visitors were scarce.

Ten minutes into my walk, the trees partially cleared, and a square stone structure stood before me. It was like a giant box, only it had no lid. I strolled around it, locating a door on the opposite side. Heavy and ancient, it creaked as I pulled it open, the old hinges unhappy over the intrusion. I gingerly peered in, not sure what to expect to find within the confines of this odd little structure.

Before me was a cemetery in miniature, with only a few lone headstones neatly lined up, completely tucked away from the outside world. Amazing, I thought, that someone would go to the trouble to wall in a cemetery in this fashion, and then for so few gravestones.

One of my idiosyncrasies is a fondness for cemeteries, especially old ones. These headstones were not particularly antique by European standards, but they were puzzling. All belonged to young men, soldiers, who had died in 1871 during the Franco-Prussian war. Why would someone bother to ship bodies all the way down to the southern coast, then take them out to this tiny island and create a cemetery all their own? The mystery of the unknown soldiers intrigued me more than the aristocrat hiding behind his plushy velvet mask.

I returned to the picnic and questioned Martine. It was a public cemetery, she said simply, completely ignoring the perplexity of the situation. I pressed further, and she asked another mother, and then one of the teachers. All knew of its existence — “a public cemetery” — but nothing of its history. Why it was here, on Ile Ste. Marguerite of all places? And the grave sites walled in, like nuns cloistered in a convent.

“We’re going now to the Maritime Museum,” she told me. “It’s very nice, you will like it.”

The school assembled to lay siege to the museum. I preferred one last walk through the eucalyptus trees and told Martine I’d meet her back at the ferry dock. Inhaling the trees’ fragrance, I contemplated the indifference I had encountered. Of course, how could one care about four lone soldiers when this was the land of Verdun and Normandy Beach, where the white crosses loomed out over the battlefields like endless acres of billowing wheat? In France, cemeteries and war dated back to Roman times, so my discovery, in the realm of things, was very insignificant.

But I returned to the clearing. And this time I wasn’t alone. A dark-haired woman wearing red terry cloth shorts had just placed a multi-colored bouquet of flowers on one of the graves. In my best French, I asked her about the cemetery.

She didn’t know, only that it was a public cemetery. And anyway, she was from Arles, in Provence. Then she laughed, reading the question in my face.

“My father, he died in Dien Bien Phu,” she replied, suddenly switching to stilted English. “France’s mess in Vietnam. He died three months before I am born.” She sighed and brushed off her bare knees. “His body, it disappears. You know how things are in war. So one day I find this cemetery. These men, they have no one. I don’t have a grave for my father. So we help each other. I bring flowers when I come.”

I returned to Ile Ste. Marguerite three weeks later, the day before I boarded my train to Paris. A fine drizzle blew through the trees, and I laid a small bunch of wildflowers by each headstone. For the father at Dien Bien Phu, I decided, and all of the others long forgotten, who need to be remembered every so often.

I sat in on some of these meetings, but often I would just roam around the town a bit, or watch the cars as I read or wrote under some tree. Whenever we stopped in a village, kids would appear. They would crowd around my car so that I could barely open the door. And then they would follow me wherever I went asking for “gifts.”

“Monsieur, cadeau! Cadeau!” they would yell, holding out their hands to me and to Henri.

“I’m famous all over Africa,” Henri joked. “Everywhere I go they call out to me. But they all think my name is Mister Cadeau.”

It soon became clear to me that most of the west Africans saw Europeans primarily as people they could get something from. Centuries of trinkets had created an unhealthy relationship that made it almost impossible for people from two different cultures to have any meaningful interaction. Though the locals were often very pleasant about it, the goal was almost always the same — get something before the white man leaves. Almost everyone I’d pass would say, “Ga va? Ga va bien, monsieur?” In France this means, “How’s it going?” — just a casual greeting. In francophone Africa, it seems to mean, “Would you like to start a conversation that will lead to a gift for me?” When I didn’t answer, the locals would just keep asking, sometimes belligerently. When I did answer, they would then ask where I was going, where I was from, how many children I had … etc. Then after a pleasant conversation, they would start looking to see if I had anything with me they might want. That was the pleasant approach in the villages. The other approach along the well-traveled tourist tracks was simply mob and grab. Sometimes I couldn’t even get out of the car.

At first I rebelled against the whole system, not wanting to play a part in reinforcing a negative dynamic. I went out in the streets with no money at all and let the kids dig through my pockets and run through their whole list of questions, trying to joke with them until they would finally settle down. Then I would ask them some questions about themselves. Sometimes they would tell me about their school or show me a toy that they had made from pieces of scrap metal. In the northeast, near Agadez, some of the kids played a kind of hackey-sack game, kicking a rolled-up wad of trash around a circle. A few times I joined them and left them all giggling because I couldn’t kick it as well as the smallest of them.

But even these brief, enjoyable encounters would invariably be broken up by a group of older kids who would send the younger ones scurrying and then start in with the “cadeau” routine all over again. Sometimes they would push a friend forward who was crippled or who had a bad cut that was festering horribly.

“You must go to the hospital,” I would say emphatically, and they would all giggle.

“I have no money for the hospital,” one boy with a deeply lacerated leg told me one day, smiling and holding out his hand while flies crawled around his wound. He and his friends would not tell me where the nearest hospital was or what it would cost to go there. I went back to the car, got some money for him, and tried to get him to promise to use it to go to a doctor. He nodded emphatically. But when I gave him the bills, the whole crowd mobbed him and the money was divided everywhere, leaving the injured boy with almost nothing. I watched in frustration as some of the bills were ripped into small pieces and could only hope that they might eventually be reassembled. This happened again and again in villages along the road. I finally had to turn my back on even the injured kids, but then I felt worse than ever. It was impossible to give and it was impossible not to give.

After just a few days in sub-Saharan Africa I felt like this was my tortuous African koan. Every dime meant a lot to most of the locals and a dollar or five dollars was a major windfall. Knowing that I had a few thousand dollars saved in my bank account for the trip, I felt I should be giving away something. But then I would be just another in a long line of white people who came through, gave handouts and went away. Henri felt that he had a perfectly equitable solution. He would give them candies and old pens that he had brought along to hand out.

“I think they are past the pen stage,” I told him one day when I was feeling particularly frustrated with the whole situation, “maybe you should give them some paper.”

The poverty just seemed too pervasive for anything to really help — anything short of regular rainfall. The Sahel, I came to realize, is a region entirely on the edge. It is on the edge of the Sahara and it receives just enough rain in a good year for the local people to eke out a meager farming existence. When the rains don’t come, it is devastating; if they don’t come for two or three years, there is widespread famine. Most of the region has much less vegetation than most of the southwest United States, looking like what most Americans consider to be desert. After four weeks in the Sahara, though, it seemed almost abundant. As we drove along, we were amazed by all of the vegetation — more bushes and trees, an occasional garden, even a few patches of green grass here and there. I was soon told that it had been a very good year for rain, well above average.

Driving down the narrow tarmac road, I could glimpse some of the quiet patterns of the local life. There were clusters of huts, with thatched roofs and thinly covered sides through which I could see a woman nursing her child or a man sleeping in the middle of the day. Sometimes there were herds of goats with young boys watching nearby. And sometimes there were women pounding cassava roots into meal with large wooden poles. The harmattan — a warm wind that blows dust in from the Sahara all winter — had started blowing, and though I couldn’t really see the fine sand in the air, I could see it in the people’s hair, and feel it in my sinuses. Every evening, because of the dust, the sun would turn into a glowing orange ball long before it settled to the horizon.

At night we would try to camp well outside of the towns so we would not attract attention. Invariably though, the people would appear, sometimes hours after we set up camp. They would sit just outside the firelight and watch every move we made. With Ludo gone, I had taken over as the cook and I was usually too busy to really notice our visitors while I was preparing the meal. Henri would eat voraciously and loudly, but between his noises, I could hear men breathing beyond the firelight and sense the hunger and sadness. It would fill me with guilt and anger. I was hungry, but I knew they were hungry too. Their gray turbans and long robes would move closer and closer into the firelight and then almost next to us until eventually they would ask for something.

“Don’t give them anything,” Henri would say, “or we’ll have a hundred in the morning.” But in the morning when we could see their kind faces, he would often give them something before we left.

One night, when Henry went straight to bed after dinner, I offered the leftovers to three kids who had been watching us for a couple of hours.

“Non, merci,” a little girl who looked about ten or eleven years old replied. The two younger boys with her shifted. They were shivering a little from the cold, so I motioned for them to come closer. She smiled and moved in to warm her feet and hands on the fire, pulling her nine-year-old brother with her. A smaller boy who might have been five or six stayed just out of the light for a little while, but eventually he came in and sat right beside me. The girl had big, curious eyes, a small upturned nose and an angelic voice that sounded like she was singing when she talked. “C’est jolie, ga!” she would say, tilting her head back and forth when I showed them something they were particularly curious about. They wouldn’t take any food or tea because they had already eaten, she said, but I finally talked them into sharing some chocolate with me. They told me that their father was the policeman in the nearby town and that they lived in the closest house to our campsite. We could see a light burning about a mile away. Even though it was already late, we talked by the fire for nearly an hour, all in French, with her and her brother correcting me when I made a grammatical error. They told me about going to school and playing soccer, and about life in their village. They said that in years before, people had been very hungry, but that now it had rained for three years and the life was very good.

“The cows and goats have much milk,” they said, “The gardens are very big.”

I asked them if they had seen the Paris-Dakar Rally because I knew it had passed nearby and I wanted to know what they thought of it. The little boy took a deep breath and his sister told me they had not seen it, but they had heard it roar by when they were in school. And then later they heard that one of the motorcycles had hit a small child on the road. At first I thought I had misunderstood, but I hadn’t. They said that a three year-old in their village had been killed by one of the racers. The mother of the child had been so distraught that something had happened to her as well, but I could not understand exactly what. The kids were very matter-of-fact about all of it, but they were also wide eyed in the telling and I knew that they were rattled by the whole thing.

No wonder no one else has come out to the camp, I thought as I poked at the fire, wishing I could really talk to the kids, that I could offer them some adequate explanation. But there was nothing I could say, because I couldn’t make the roaring trucks and the quiet African town fit together myself.

After a while I knew I should turn in, so I showed them how my tent went up. Each of the two poles snapped together with the help of their internal bungee cords and then they formed the front and back arches that made the whole thing nearly stand up on its own. The kids loved it and couldn’t wait to get inside. I didn’t have the heart to tell them no. The four of us climbed on in and the littlest boy fell asleep on top of my down sleeping bag, while I showed his brother and sister some postcards I had bought in Europe with pictures of Paris, Venice, and Rome, and my maps of Africa showing all the terrain in color with big swatches of yellow for the desert and green for the jungles. They knew almost every capital when I named a country, but they had never seen them on a map. They were particularly excited to see where their home was, right in the heart of West Africa. They scoured the area nearby to find names of places that they knew, and they seemed very surprised that Niamey was so close and that the great Niger River went through other countries besides their own.

“C’est jolie, ga! C’est trhs jolie!” the little girl said with a big smile before she dragged her brothers home.

I slept peacefully all night and in the morning I woke to Henri yelling, “Allez, allez — go away!” I could see my three little friends, scampering across the sand back towards their house. I yelled to them before they got too far and they came back, though the littlest brother kept giving Henri a wary eye. Henri tried to give them bread to make up for his rudeness, but they politely refused. Instead, the little girl brought out three small oranges and gave them to me, “for breakfast.” Then the older boy produced a leather bracelet with cowry shells and some small, colorful beads sewn on it. It was a “friendship bracelet” his sister explained as he smiled broadly.

I let them help me pack up the cars, though Henri was sure they would steal something. I just laughed at him. Before we left I told the little girl that she was “tres jolie” and that they were all very good kids.

“Merci, monsieur,” she said with her big smile.

“Merci, monsieur,” the older brother said also, while the little one smiled. Then they picked up their bags and headed off to school. Only later did I realize that I hadn’t given them any “cadeau” in return and they had never asked.

Excerpted from the book “Africa Solo: A Journey Across the Sahara,
Sahel, and Congo,” by Kevin Kertscher. Copyright 1998 by Kevin Kertscher.
Reprinted by permission of Steerforth Press.