Page 63 was obvious even to me that he was lost. I felt quietly happy about this. It always happens to me when I take visitors to tourist attractions. However Jerry eventually evaded the cordon of signs, home in on the car park and whizzed up a series of spiral ramps, which it would be fun to roller skate down until he found a vacant space on the umpteenth floor. After admir- ing the view we took the lift again and found ourselves thronging the streets. It reminded me of Paris. Not that I've ever been to Paris, but that's what it reminded me of. It was stylish, elegant, sophisticated, cosmopolitan. After the aggressive Americanism of every other city I had seen in the States it was a breath of European air. The advertisements seemed less blatant, the shop window displays subtler, the buildings more permanent, even the traffic less hectic. The men seemed more quietly dressed, more polite and more relaxed. The girls were tastefully dressed and pretty in every conceivable racial and multi- racial way. There was, above all, a general impression that people liked one another and liked living in San Francisco. I was beginning to understand why, and how this city had redeemed America in the eyes of the world aL the time of the Kruschev visit, and for all we know saved mankind. This was what America could become. It was a revelation. It seemed to me that everyone at home who is inclined to resent the creeping tide of Americanism in our cities should come and look at San Francisco, and see for themselves that Americanism...which is just the term these people use for a society based on mass production, high consumption and the automobile...can be integrated with traditional European values. People who run screaming from the concrete desert of Los Angeles should pause for breath in San Francisco and see that there is another answer. A city which is the hope of the world. But after crossing a few intersections we found ourselves in another city altogether, an Oriental one. We were in Chinatown, where everything was Chinese except the price tags, and even the telephone kiosks were little pagodas. Hundreds of little shops offered strange and fascinating things for sale. Miriam and Jerry were looking for a Mexican restaurant, of all things. Madeleine was looking for a cheap cheongsam, a garment which has done more than Mao Tse Tsung to unsettle Western Mankind, and Ethel, who had had an early breakfast, was looking for food. I didn't mind one way or another because though I liked cheongsams and food, I thought the situation of three Celts, a Slav and an Anglo- Saxon looking for a Mexican restaurant in the Chinese quarter of an American city founded by Spain was the last word in exoticism. However Ethel's was the most basic need, transcending the instincts of sex and even the craving for en- chiladas, and since the place was fairly crottling with Chinese restaurants we finished up eating a typical fannish meal of four dinners among five people. Outside again we went to catch a cable car. San Francisco is built upon what appears to be a miniature mountain range, and only sheer determination pre- vents the entire population from slithering down to the waterfront. Those who have ended up there are periodically dredged up again by cable cars, for redis- tribution about the peaks of the city. The cable cars are engagingly antiquated contraptions. Emmet-ations of ordinary single-deck trams, driven by a clutch engaging a moving cable through a slot in the ground. This device permits the most dramatic effects of acceleration and braking, and what with this and the clattering and grinding and lurching they seem to go at crazy speed through the more respectable traffic. They are more like something in a fanfair than a means of public transport, and everyone seemed to enjoy them as much as we tourists. You feel somehow that San Francisco has a holiday running down the middle of its streets. A cable car finally ground to a halt on level ground at the waterfront and everyone reluctantly got out. It was now positioned at a sort of turntable, and