In the very depths of the densest jungle in Brasil, there exists a circular plain of stubble. A perfect circle. This is the Panalto District, and no man has ever come out of it alive. Elias Wentik might, perhaps, be the exception. He finds himself imprisoned in the very centre of the plain, subject to humiliating and bizarre sessions of interrogation. And this visit, so completely contemporary in its paranoid vision of strangeness, has revealed to him the incredible secret of the Panalto.