M IS AUSPICIOUS for me, so on April 23 I flew out of Naypyidaw to Mandalay, the last royal capital. For two days, there were heavy rains here, which plunged the city into darkness and left the Burmese grinning: rain, in the dry season! But when I hired a taxi and drove southwest, across the paddy-flat plains of central Burma's "dry zone," the fields were powdery again with dust. The temperature climbed over 100 and then kept rising during a long day of rumbling down increasingly desperate roads, impoverished children chasing after the car.

I was headed for the town of Pakokku, the place where the Saffron Revolution had begun. The Burmese were once allotted two gallons of gasoline a day, at subsidized prices. Last August, the junta—having sold Burma's own hydrocarbons abroad—eliminated the subsidy. The cost of bus rides, running a generator, even eating a bowl of rice, jumped as much as 500 percent. The unrest, which started as a protest about the price of gas and exploded into nationwide demonstrations, was sparked at one monastery, in Pakokku.

The town is on the west bank of the great Irrawaddy, which cleaves and defines Burma. To get there, I had to catch a riverboat at Bagan, where thousands of ancient temples squat on the river's east bank. There are more than 4,000 Buddhist structures here, built between the 11th and 13th centuries; more than 2,000 still stand, from tiny shrines to 18-story numbers rivaling the tallest of the Maya pyramids at Tikal.

In the off-season of an off-country, with the temperature hovering somewhere near 110 degrees, even the trinket vendors had retired. There were a few Spaniards and Germans about, but at one of the world's greatest archaeological sites, I had a temple—a dozen temples—to myself at sunset. If the government were less charmingly North Korean, less reeking of Cambodia in 1978, Bagan and Burma could mean a great deal to the world.

Early the next morning, I boarded the slim, crowded ferry to Pakokku. The passengers included market women, giggling students, and an English-speaking professional, who at first talked freely about the Saffron Revolution and what he'd seen. Eventually he realized that I was a journalist and recoiled. The docks were full of informers, he warned me. Spies were everywhere. "I'm sorry," he said, "I can't get involved in politics." He stared into the dirty bilgewater for the rest of the trip.

No one was waiting on the dock to arrest me. I visited Pakokku's garish pagoda, filled with glass tiles, gold paint, and real birds flitting past murals of bodhi trees. I hired a rickshaw and went to the particular monastery where the Saffron Revolution began. There, the giggling young monks gave me lumps of palm sugar and showed me their teak longhouse, with its dusty library full of tripitaka scriptures and colonial-era British encyclopedias and a Bengal tiger pelt on their teacher's throne.

But now there was no teacher. Roughly 150 of the monastery's older monks had been "sent home"—a form of house arrest—by the junta in the wake of the rebellion. The unrest started on September 5, when several hundred monks began a march for the poor, chanting, "Release from suffering," their way of asking for lower gas prices. On the town's only bridge, their moral force met the junta's plain old force: warning shots, beatings, and arrests. That kind of repression is normal for Burma, but then the army, people in Pakokku told me, tied up one of the monks and left him, bound in the street, for a whole day, roasting in the sun.

You do not humiliate monks in Burma. The next day, when a government delegation came to the monastery to apologize, a mob burned their squad car and then smashed up the business of the town's biggest snitch. Inside a week, word of the beating of several monks had spread, and tens of thousands of his colleagues took to the streets. Almost every town in Burma saw demonstrations, led by the red-robed clerics and followed by angry students and just about everyone else. But in Rangoon it ended. On September 27, at the Sule Pagoda, a miraculous gilded landmark that sits inside a traffic circle, the army lashed back, shooting into crowds. Officially, 31 died over the course of the unrest, but human-rights groups say it was hundreds. The revolution was put back in a bottle, for now at least.

Not that anyone told me any of this in Pakokku. Later during that burning afternoon, at the well in their monastery courtyard, the monks never warned me that we were under surveillance or said that they were just young initiates, left behind, afraid.

They never cried and asked me to forget their words, their names, and their faces.