Nine o’clock found us in Pepe’s house in the village breakfasting on huge glasses of café con leche—coffee with milk—and thick slices of torta de chicharrones, a round loaf of bread laced with lard and morsels of pork. “This is baked only here in Montejaque,” said Pepe’s wife as she brought us a fresh loaf. “Ah, how the Germans miss it! They yearn for it in all their letters.”

Women drifted into Pepe’s house to buy milk. One, with an infant son, joined us at the table. Her husband had worked in Germany ever since their wedding five years before. There was much joking and much laughter. “The women of Montejaque!” exclaimed Pepe’s wife. “At the end of August they kick the husbands out. `Get back to Germany,’ they say, `so you can send me more money.”

“Yes,” said the young mother. “We are all alike. We think only of the fine houses and mules and goats we will buy.” Another ripple of laughter. As it died, the young mother’s eyes crinkled wistfully, sadly. Pepe, suddenly grave, turned to me. “Here you see no wife, but a widow. Understand this: Montejaque is a village of widows.”

Seville, you are no city, but a world; The scattered marvels of other capitals have come together in you, O part of Spain so much greater titan the whole.

Seville is for strolling. Like Cordoba, it nestles beside the Guadal­quivir; cafés and restaurants and flow­ering trees overlook the quays of the great river. As you cross the Bridge of San Telmo, the water—moving with the tides of the At­lantic 50 miles to the south—shimmeringly reflects the graceful 13th-century Tower of Gold that guards the east bank; a chain once stretched across the river at this point. Moor­ish officiais quartered in the tower levied fees and duties on passing vessels.

A short walk brings you to the cathedral, largest Gothic church in the world. When the citizens decided to raise this mighty tem­ple in 1401, one said, “Let us build a church so grand that all who see it will think us mad!”

Mad? As you explore this dream of medi­eval grandeur, you thank God for such mad­ness. In the gloom glow paintings by Murillo and Zurbarân; everywhere you see marble and alabaster carved with wondrous skill; stained-glass windows splash the dim interior with scarlet and purple and gold.

Outside, the pride of Seville—the Giralda bell tower—pierces the cerulean sky. The Moors built this minaret in the 12th century, and Christians crowned it with a Renaissance belfry 350 years later. Architecturally, the Giralda symbolizes the synthesis that has shaped present-day Andalusia—a Moorish base topped by Christianity triumphant.

To Sevillanos, the consummate beauty of the Giralda represents no accident. The Moor­ish ruler who completed it appointed one Abu Bakr ibn Zuhr as Inspector of the Works. Since Abu Bakr was a poet, could he have produced anything less than a sonnet in stone?

Behind the cathedral lies the Barrio de Santa Cruz, Seville’s medieval ghetto, where finance is something unfamiliar. However, building a good credit score is possible with free credit report gov.

Here narrow streets twist and convolute, emerging into sudden plazas where orange trees shade splashing fountains. Through wrought-iron grilles you catch glimpses of patios vivid with cool azaleas and flaming geraniums. Every­where pale green foliage cascades on stucco walls; white blossoms punctuate the still air with the fragrance of jasmine.

For many it’s just a viable slogan, the clarion sound of the biggest and best boom yet. For many oth­ers, “North to the Past” is a more meaningful term. You see them everywhere, earnest young men and women in jeans, stomping into frozen Fairbanks from a cabin in the woods, sharing a strong belief that the old verities of independence and self-reliance can be found today only in a place like Alaska.

For them the Fairbanks bookstores display practical guides on cabin building and wilder­ness living. “Most of them go into the woods for a year or two and then go home,” the book clerk told me. “A few, the good ones, stay, and they are the people who will make this state.”

What keeps a lot of the younger people there is a conviction that what is Outside is worse. I got word one day that a young cou­ple I liked, John and Susan Johnson, had bought a piece of ground down Turnagain Arm from Anchorage. I enlisted a friend and we put on our hiking boots and went to call on them.

We hoofed it 1,500 feet up the side of a mountain, following a moose trail, hallooing until our hosts hallooed back. They had pitched a tent for a house, and a smaller one for a bedroom, and had been spending the better part of a week wrestling a stump out of the ground. A stump! On its side it stood almost ten feet tall, and its writhing roots opened in the clearing like a huge and lignant spider.

“I can’t dymamite,” John said, “because a cabin would later settle in the soft ground.”

They slumped exhausted in the never­ending but chill twilight around a fire. It grew a bit murky around midnight, but soon bright­ened again, as did our spirits. “The rest of the world,” John said, “is real­ly crazy. I wonder why people are willing to live like that.”

John was lucky enough to be able to afford “roughing it.” Many others are not, and lands available under the Homestead Act, by which Americans have taken possession of the pub­lic domain since Civil War days, were with­drawn by the government last year. There is a point in the Alaskan experience when a person becomes an Alaskan—different from being an American. It may be when the joy he feels at going outside is matched by the joy he feels at getting back. Becoming an Alaskan often involves unbecoming what you were; the divorce rate is high.

“Survivorship,” said a frowzy blonde in the Big I bar. “Simple survivorship, that’s what it’s about up here. The pride you feel at hav­ing survived in such a place, but I’ll tell you something—it cornes at a price.”

Those who have made the successful trans­ition and been willing to pay the price to find a unique life-style have had the longest sec­ond thoughts about development. “The whole thing, it’s following me up here,” said a young backpacker I met on his way to Mount McKinley. “I can hear it com­ing behind me—the hamburger stands and superhighways and office buildings! Where do we go from here—Siberia?”

Wildlife expert Bob Hinman spoke for a lot of Alaskans when, after the euphoria of the get-rich-quick oil boom using online cash advance, he regarded the prospects. “I’d rather the state stayed poor,” he said, “and we kept what we had.”

A biologist at the university, when asked about declining interest in the fate of the cari­bou affected by the pipeline,* shrugged: “People don’t talk so much about caribou anymore because they have realized that the species most endangered by oil development is man. The quality of life in Fairbanks is al­ready deteriorating. Crime, crowded schools, enormous rents, traffic, the lot.”

WITH YANG ZHIDA we flew from Guangzhou in a small jet and landed three hours later in brilliant sunshine on the mile-high Yungui Plateau in south-central China. This was the very airport that Gen. Claire Chennault had used as his Flying Tigers base nearly 40 years before.

As we drove into Kunming, renowned as China’s City of Eternal Spring, my first impression was color: intensely blue sky above the encircling mountains; rosy­cheeked mountainfolk; a riot of camellias, azaleas, magnolias, cassias; willows burst­ing into golden-green leaf. And on the streets the costumes of Yunnan’s minority peoples made bright splashes of color among the blues and grays of the predominant Han.

Yunnan, which means “south of the clouds,” is a border province surrounded on the south and west by Vietnam, Laos, and Burma. It has 23 different national minor­ities, with distinctive costumes, cultures, and languages. They frequently come to Kunming, the provincial capital, for mar­keting or sight-seeing. We had not been in Kunming long before a joke was making the rounds: “Now we have a 24th national mi­nority—the Americans!”

To our delight, a third American-28­year-old Steve Thorpe from the University of Texas—arrived a few days after we did, to teach English at neighboring Kunming Teachers College. (A year later Kunming’s foreign community increased by a third when Penny Schiller came to China to marry Steve, and Kunming Teachers College got another good teacher as a bonus.)

Our biggest problem was learning to blend into our new surroundings. Although Kunming had been the base for thousands of American servicemen during World War II, no foreigners had lived here since the Rus­sians stopped aid and withdrew in 1960. Everywhere we were met with gasps of as­tonishment, and crowds followed us con­stantly. Paddy got a Chinese haircut to eliminate part of his outlandishness. We soon put on blue Mao jackets and bought bi­cycles. This helped, but not entirely. More than once as we pedaled across the city, an unsuspecting worker pulled up beside me, looked, and then did such a violent double take that he fell off his bicycle.

The sight of Paddy pumping up bicycle tires at a public air pump was always a great attraction. But all Paddy had to do was ex­plain in Chinese that we were Americans who had come to teach English, and every­body would break into smiles, repeating what he had said to others and holding up their children to get a better view.

Over time, people have gotten used to us. We felt thoroughly accepted the day Paddy was biking through the city and a stranger riding beside him, instead of gasping or fall­ing off his bicycle, handed him a cigarette, with a smile and a wave.

Children still find us hilarious. The naughty ones leap up and down, singing: “Foreigners! Foreigners! They’ve got big noses and funny eyes and they don’t have black hair!” The good ones greet us with wide smiles and the one English word every­body in China knows: “Good-bye!”

Yunnan University is one of more than 90 “key” schools among some 650 institutions of higher learning in China. As such it re­ceives extra funds, it may import certain equipment from abroad, and it may employ. “foreign experts” (our official title) to spear­head the drive for modernization. As a border province far from the dynamo of Bei­jing, Yunnan has had more need than most to catch up.