He takes lodging in a cheap hotel, and awakes in the middle of the night plagued by the humidity, heat, insects and mild intestinal pain.
Violating his own self-imposed limit to his walk ("fifteen minutes"), he approaches a glowing bonfire in the distance: a small craft is floating near the beach.
About an hour later the boat arrives at a primitive cantina frequented by laborers employed by a sugar processing plant, the fictional Compañía Azucarera Riomartillense.
He interacts with a number of the denizens of the cantina: a supercilious and hostile off-duty Latin soldier, an expatriate American from Milwaukee, a local female prostitute.
Suffering from high fever and delirium, Bowles conceived a short story that involves a protagonist who imbibes a South American alcoholic concoction with hallucinogenic effects, the "cumbiamba", a strictly literary invention.
"[4] Paul Bowles, in his 1988 introduction to A Distant Episode: The Selected Stories, by Ecco Press remarked: Creativity is an eruption of the unconscious.