East St.Louis begins at the Monsanto fence. Rain starts falling as we cross the railroad tracks, and then another set of tracks, and pass a series of dirt streets with houses that are mostly burnt-out shells, the lots between them piled with garbage bags and thousands of abandoned auto tires. The city is almost totally flat and lies below the Mississippi's floodline, protected by a levee. In 1986 a floodgate broke and filled part of the city. Houses on Bond Avenue filled up with sewage to their second floors.

The waste water emitted from the sewage plant, according to a recent Greenpeace study, "varies in color from yellow-orange to green." The toxic substances that it contains become embedded in the soil and the marshland in which children play. Dead Creek, for example, a creekbed that received discharges from the chemical and metal plants in previous years, is now a place where kids from East St. Louis ride their bikes. The creek, which smokes by day and glows on moonless nights, has gained some notoriety in recent years for instances of spontaneous combustion. The Illinois EPA believes that the combustion starts when children ride their bikes across the creek bed, "creating friction which begins the smoldering process."

"Nobody in East St. Louis," Ahmed says, "has ever had the clout to raise a protest. Why Americans permit this is so hard for somebody like me, who grew up in the real Third World, to understand...

"I'm from India. In Calcutta this would be explicable, perhaps. I keep thinking to myself, 'My God! This is the United States!'"

By midnight, hardly anyone is out on foot. In block after block, there is no sense of life. only the bars and liquor stores are open - but the windows of the liquor stores are barred. There is a Woolworth's store that has no windows. Silently in the persistent rain a dark shape looms before us and cuts off the street: a freight train loaded with chemicals or copper, moving slowly to the north. There is no right or wrong side of the tracks in East St. Louis. The tracks are everywhere.

Behind us still: the eerie specter of the lights and girders of Monsanto. In front of us, perhaps two miles away: the beautiful St. Louis Arch and, under it, the brightly lighted skyline of St. Louis.

"The ultimate terror for white people," Ahmed says, "is to leave the highway by mistake and find themselves in East St. Louis. People speak of getting lost in East St. Louis as a nightmare. The nightmare to me is that they never leave that highway so they never know what life is like for all the children here. They ought to get off that highway. The nightmare isn't in their heads. It's a real place. there are children living here.

"Jesse Jackson came to speak at East St. Louis High. There were three thousand people packed into the gym. He was nearly two hours late. When he came in, the feeling was electric. There was a pin-drop silence while he spoke. An old man sat beside me, leaning forward on his cane. He never said a word but he was crying.

"You would think, with all the chemical and metals plants, that there would be unlimited employment. It doesn't work that way. most of these are specialized jobs. East St. Louis men don't have the education. I go into the Monsanto plant and almost every face I see is white.

"The biggest employer in the town is public education. Next, perhaps, the Pfizer plant, which is situated just behind one of the high schools. After that, the biggest businesses may be the drug trade, funerals and bars and prostitution. The mayor's family owns the largest funeral home in East St. Louis. The Catholic high school was shut down last year. There's talk of turning it into a prison."

There is a pornography theater in the center of town but no theater showing movies suitable for children. East St. Louis is the largest city south of Springfield in the state of Illinois but was left off the Illinois map four years ago. The telephone directory that serves the region does not list phone numbers of the residents or businesses of East St. Louis, even though the city lies right at the center of the service area that the directory is supposed to cover. Two years ago, the one pedestrian bridge across the Mississippi River to St. Louis was closed off to East St. Louis residents.