He orders up a large pot of coffee, which barely keeps him awake long enough to unpack. It is late afternoon. Purple clouds tumble out of the surrounding mountains with the palpable momentum of volcanic mudflows and turn half of the sky into a blank wall striped with vertical bolts of lightning; the walls of the hotel room flash with it as though paparazzi are working outside the window. Below, food vendors in Rizal Park run up and down the sidewalks to get out of the rain, which falls, as it has been doing for about half a millennium, on the sloping black walls of Intramuros. If those walls did not run in straight lines they could be mistaken for a natural freak of geology: ridges of bare, dark volcanic rock erupting from the grass like teeth from gums. The walls have dovetail-shaped notches that converge to old gun emplacements, providing interlocking fields of fire across a dry moat.