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Let me backtrack: Last week I wrote in this column about Jan Morris, anticipating her appearance in a travel writers' conference I was chairing later in the week. In that same column I also mentioned Pico Iyer and Tim Cahill, the two other travel writers who were guests of honor at the event.

I intended to move on to a different topic this week, but after spending four summer-camp-intense days in the presence of these craft masters, in workshops and panels and dinners and readings and late-night beer and travel tale revels, my mind refuses to let go of them. Their words and their writings stay with me; their warmth and intelligence and generosity stay with me, too.

We parted on Sunday and I went to work on Monday, half in the office and half still enmeshed in that conference, and then on Monday night I settled down with Cahill's most recent collection of stories, "Pass the Butterworms."

Leafing through them reminded me of my first encounters with Cahill -- during the early 1980s, when he was a sometime contributor to the San Francisco Examiner's Sunday magazine, where I was a senior editor. At that time, I was awed by Cahill's daring. He dove with sharks, walked among gorillas, explored caves and cliffs and end-of-the-world places most sane humans would just rather not even contemplate. And he did it all with aplomb. What I didn't realize, and what I heard only a couple of days ago, was that he was "studying the mechanism of fear," and trying to grapple with the factors at the bottom of that fear: mortality, death.

As a reader, I was awed by Cahill's ability to physically push the envelope; as an editor, I was awed by his ability to push a similar envelope stylistically, playing with perspective and chronology, delivering life-changing lessons in deceptively simple and seductive accounts. And I realized that he brought the same daring, intelligence and accomplishment to his writing that he did to his travels.

All this came back to me as I leafed through his tales. Finally I settled on one to savor slowly as the moon shone smokily through the clouds. This was the last piece in "Pass the Butterworms," entitled "Among the Karowai: A Stone Age Idyll," and -- like the best of Cahill's work -- it took me places I never expected to visit and taught me things I never expected to learn.

The story begins in typically disarming Cahill fashion: "It was, I suppose, a single piece of ineptly executed and cynically fashioned art that sent me fleeing five hundred miles upriver, back into time, and deep into the malarial heart of the swamp. The people I wanted to meet -- it was only later that I would come to know them as Karowai -- lived a Stone Age life and knew almost nothing of the outside world. They were, some said, headhunters, cannibals, savages. If so, they still owned their own lives."

This opening has elements of what Cahill called at the conference the "reverse parallelogram lead" -- so called because "no one knows what the hell it means." The idea is that if the lead is written intriguingly enough, your curiosity will lead you farther into the jungle of the story itself. But we do get some intimation of what is to come -- a trip up a river and back into time, with a healthy dose of malarial danger thrown in.

And this lead certainly draws me on. I want to know more about the inept and cynical piece of art that sent him up the river, and I want to know more about the Karowai. And I am delightfully tweaked in quintessential Cahill perspective-bending fashion by the last two sentences: Normally you would expect "They were, some said, headhunters, cannibals, savages" to be followed by some sentence alluding to the author's fear and bravado in venturing boldly among such terrifying people. Instead, Cahill turns the spotlight on the people themselves, gets inside their heads to find the admirable and heartening truth such a rumor suggests: that they have not yet lost themselves to the forces of the modern world.

And so we're off. Next we meet an entrepreneurial immigrant from Java named Rudy, who wears a Lacoste shirt and Playboy neck chain, and who takes us to his shabby shop, where soulless works of "native Asmat art" are sold.

This encounter leads Cahill to a quick discourse on the ancient and noble lineage of Asmat art -- whose pieces are prized in such prominent places as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. This, in turn, leads to further information about the Asmat people, and the spooking tale of anthropologist Michael Rockefeller, who explored the same territory Cahill is about to visit. Rockefeller's enigmatic end -- his body was never found after his boat capsized and he began to swim to shore -- continues to inspire stories that he was eaten by tribe members as revenge for a murder committed by whites some years before.

Now we are some 20 paragraphs into the story -- and the adventure begins: "The boat was a forty-foot-long dugout, no more than three feet wide, and powered by a 40-horsepower kerosene Yamaha engine." The journey upriver is starting, but our adventure has already begun: We have a sense of Rudy's town as the kind of sad outpost where one can witness the unraveling of an ancient civilization, an outpost that in fact is hastening that unraveling; we have learned about the complex culture of the Asmat and about a semi-legendary explorer who never returned.

At the travel writers' conference, Cahill said, "Every good travel story embodies a quest." Our quest -- to see what is to be found upriver, among possible cannibals -- is on.

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