The phone rings.

"This is Mike Fay," says the rough but clear voice through the phone receiver. "I'm in the middle of the northern Congo right now."

This is the long distance call, goes the song in the back of my head.

At the receiving end of the long-distance phone call is myself in a cube farm, my rag-and-bone shop of wall hangings serving as windows to remind myself of my past, and to jog ideas forward. I'm surrounded by other human search engines, in their own geometric cubes, scanning the World Wide Web.

This is our office outpost in Boston; in itself a tangled Web of civilization sliced and diced, the mulch of history piled upon itself, brick by brick, sod by sod, leaf layers and the refuse of subway tickets and discarded Dunkin' Donut containers. Needham, Mass., is just one twisted thicket for technological man, one end of a long march of fence posts and railroad lines and highways and fiber-optic facilities running east to Eureka, Calif., the furthest West you can get in the upper 48 states. There's also a lot of clear-cutting of Redwood groves going on there.

Between us (meaning me and the caller): ocean, air and a curtain of jungle so impenetrable civilization took this long just to crack it open with a mere beam of digits.

Fay and I are bound by satellites, by connect-o-dots of digitized sound. I'd originally cracked through the jungle curtain with a brief note by using an Iridium satellite pager, and now he's responding with another satellite system, called Inmarsat-B, which is better for voice communication.

The hand-held phone Fay is using weighs less than one-half kilogram, pretty handy when you are paying pygmies to lug, among other things, 16,800 AA batteries into deepest, greenest Africa.

"These are days of miracles and wonder..."

"The place we've come through was kind of weird," he says. "Some of it was savanna, but mostly it was just forest.

"This is certainly the first phone call made from this river."

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Assuming I'm online, I can reach our man in the Congo by dialing Iridium.com into the browser, clicking on the "country" dialed from, clicking on "send satellite message," typing in the 12-digit pager number, then a 120-character message, then click.

So by the same method that's a similar number of actions. Don't ask me how to make a plain phone call to the Congo. What's the area code for the Kandeko River megatransect, anyway?

You could tell the operators standing by that Fay was in the section of the jungle called Lengoue. If they happened to be good with Global Positioning Satellites, he's at about 0 (degrees) 40' N, 16(degrees) 4' E, probably hacking his way through a huge flood plain covered with the type of jungle that inspired the film "The Lost World."

Fay and his party have gone far with few to reach the many. As he states on the Congo Trek opening page, dated, Sept. 20, 1999: "We are trying to reach the hundreds of millions, to let them see what's out there, to find out what the issues are, to find out how they can make a difference."

The conservationist has striven to create protected areas in the Congo, but in this case he's talking about a virtual national park.

"When I get back, I plan on maintaining a Web site that will take every image, every piece of data that I have, indicating where I was and what time, for the entire trip, so they can locate it on a map and experience it, follow the whole trip, in an interactive way," he says. "I pull out the video camera maybe 50 times a day. As I'm walking I'm carrying a notebook and we are pulling a string along the entire way to record kilometer blocks of the transect. We have a GPS getting the location, a fix every 20 seconds, a complete track of exactly where we were. So some day people can go to the site and ask the database, 'Show me elephant dung at a 12-kilometer length of the transect,' and they will be able to see exactly what I saw in real-time."

Fay, of course, has no idea what's appearing about his adventure on the National Geographic Web site, except for the essence of the text that he sends in. He's recording the jungle for cyberspace, but he's too mobile to go online.

And the "reader's respond"-style e-mail program he'd planned is also experiencing glitches. So during this long-distance call, he asks questions about the political campaign in the U.S. and I tell him about the upcoming Super Bowl. I get the sense, or maybe he almost plain comes out and says, that it feels good to hear voices from the civilized world.

Consider a day in his life. He's out there with a research assistant, a tech guy, who I'm sure are plenty good company, and then a whole bunch of pygmies.

I've interviewed a lot of people on the phone over the years, but I never felt such a strong insistence by the source to keep the conversation going. How many people from the "world" has he heard from?

"Over the weeks?" He pauses to think. "Not too many people."

The long-distance call gets quiet. A one-year walk through the jungle sounds like lonely work. Civilization is clear-cutting faster than he can stretch a string across each kilometer. He helped to create Nouabale-Ndoki National Park, where most of the trek takes place, and there are now several roads and a railroad track leading in all directions. The most immediate audience he's trying to reach on a daily basis, the pygmies, just aren't getting worried enough, and the Golden Spike of civilization is barking at his heels.

"You are never going to convince a pygmy that logging is bad," he says. "We came to a logging road and they were so excited. They had never seen a road before. They think the roads are good, logging is good, the towns are good. What's really striking in their minds are the strange houses they see and the girls they almost got."

"It's their term for Gods," he says. "On days we have to arrange to get our supplies, we give the airplane the GPS location and then direct the group to a certain clearing. The plane flies overhead right where we came out of the woods, and the supplies drop out of the sky. The pygmies really get excited at this. They really believe we are gods."

But Fay says once you penetrate the language barrier, there's little difference between a pygmy and a "Nzambi." They, too, are driven to record and memorize each and every tree, as if mapping out this Eden were as basic and important as being fruitful and multiplying.

"These pygmies are incredibly good at memorizing things," Fay says. "One guy is a botanist. He knows every tree in the forest. He could tell you which animal eats which bark, and they all seem to have encyclopedic memories of everything they have seen on this trip. They remember every bush, every stone."

Ah, but would they be able to find the spot in the jungle when Fay commits his research to cyberspace?

"If they can get through the hell hole we came through, they can certainly navigate the Internet," he responds.

The phone call eventually ends and I strain my brain to remember the lines to a Paul Simon song, "The Boy in the Bubble," from "Graceland." Something about these being "days of miracles and wonder. This is the long distance call." Eventually, I have to look it up.

Part of it goes:

"And I believe
"These are the days of lasers in the jungle somewhere
"Staccato signals of constant information
"A loose affiliation of millionaires
"And billionaires...

Feeling pretty Nzambi, I return to my search engines, looking for the name of local trash incinerator that spews foul-smelling stuff in my suburban jungle north of Boston. I look up brainy environmental Web sites and send cosmic Nzambi-fied e-mail to everyone I know. Eventually, I calm down.