We stopped at a large room, with two couches, where a Chinese official in a Western suit asked me if I would like tea. The proper papers were signed, the guns were put into a locked safe, and I was given a receipt. Then we all drank tea, with nothing much to say to one another. I didn't want to tell them that the airline had lost one of my bags, the heavy one, containing several thousand rounds of ammunition for the rifles.

We began talking about food, and the man in the suit said that while I was in China I absolutely had to have a traditional snake dinner. It was a man's dinner, for real men, and as such was manly in a vigorous masculine manner, etc. I gathered snake was one of those foods thought to put lead in the old pencil. Chinese men, I was led to understand, dined on snake in large groups, all of them becoming more virile and potent with each bite. In America, the same process is associated with beer. Which, as I discovered, was not too far off the point.

I was traveling with an American named Michael Abbot, and we had to make do with a two-man reptile feed. The restaurant in our hotel, I was
informed, was famous for its snake. The dining room was elegant: There were indoor ponds and bridges and fountains. When the waitress arrived at our table, I pointed to the English menu: snake.

She said something not in my 20-word Mandarin vocabulary, but eventually I understood that I was to get up and discuss my dinner choice with a small man standing off in one corner. The corner, I saw, was stacked floor-to-ceiling with glass fish tanks containing all manner of sea life. There were also chicken-wire cages in which various terrestrial animals waited to be chosen, rather like puppies in a pet shop window.

The man took me to the snake cage. There were 15 or 20 of them in there, all twisted up together like a ball of yarn, and I understood I was to pick one out for my dinner. I have little experience in the matter of choosing a tasty snake and simply pointed at the biggest one, a creature a little over six feet long and about as big around as the business end of a baseball bat. The man opened the top of the cage, reached in, and grabbed the snake behind the head. Then he stood there speaking rapidly in an apologetic tone while the snake hung loosely in his hand, its tail twitching and curling on the floor.

The snake, it turned out, was not venomous, and hence was less effective in generating virility. The man was terribly sorry, but it would be a week before any restaurants in Beijing could stock poisonous snake. This was by decree of the government.

What was the reason for the rule? The snake man gestured for me to look around the restaurant so I could see the reason for myself.

The dining room was packed with women: women from Africa and Latin America, women in the traditional dress of Saudi Arabia, Polynesia, and Thailand. A United Nations conference on women was in progress in Beijing, and the government didn't want any international incidents, such as a foreign woman being killed by a venomous snake in a restaurant. Also, it might be better if the men these women encountered weren't feeling excessively, well, manly.

So I was going to get to eat a harmless snake, which would probably only increase my potency a teensy little bit. This was well and good, since I would be dining in a room full of strange women, none of whom had expressed the slightest wish to share my company, or anything else I had to offer.

I returned to my seat as the man dragged the snake back toward the kitchen. Almost immediately, it seemed, the waitress arrived with two small clear glass pitchers. One pitcher contained a colorless alcoholic beverage. I didn't quite catch the name—Maotai, or something like that. I have since been told that the generic name is bai jiu, meaning, literally, "white alcohol." The other pitcher was filled with the snake's blood.

The waitress set two shot glasses on the table. She dropped a small slimy nugget of snake—the gallbladder—into the pitcher of blood. Then she began poking at the nugget with what looked like a sharp metal chopstick. It slithered around and around on the bottom of the pitcher, but she finally nailed it, and something green—the bile?—began coloring the blood. She stirred the mixture, but the green gall, which didn't emulsify well, swirled slowly around the pitcher in various viscous amoeboid shapes, rather like a Lava lamp.

That, apparently, was what it was supposed to look like, because the waitress nodded, as if at a job well done, and poured the shot glasses pretty well full with white alcohol, topped off with a dollop of Lava lamp snake's blood. Using gestures, she urged us to drink a toast to the coming dinner.