Ivan gave me the last of his antibiotics at breakfast. It was a noble gesture, the kind of thing done only by fools and saints. He was the one member of our team that had not been afflicted on some level. Such was his empathy that he surrendered his biologic life boat. I would like to have been larger than the offer, but we were headed into the jungle.
We set out on the trail and soon enough descended into the hothouse of damp flora. But the weight of altitude was in our favor, with the down climbs being greater than the ascents. In the end it was not so bad. We arrived at camp 2 by mid afternoon.
Camp two was empty. There should have been many Porters with their families. This should have been where we stopped, where I rested and blew my nose with impunity. It was a ghost camp. The message of this was clear, yet I campaigned against reality. "It's three o'clock," I complained," shouldn't they be here... in the longhouse... you know?" But the Porters had pressed on. We would be making camp somewhere between camp 2 and 1. I did not recall a clear space between camps 1 and 2, nothing larger than a vending machine in any case, and I simply did not have it in me to make camp 1. I uttered profanity.
But there was a spot. It was small. So small that our tents all touched the Porters' tent. There was a modest ledge above a river where a tiny meadow of ferns clustered. These had been harvested for the evening meal and thus a space cleared for our tents. We consumed something caloric and retired for the night. As Denis and I lay there listening to the muddled conversation of the Porters the air filled with the scent of cinnamon. Resourceful as always, the tribal members used whatever dry wood could be obtained. On this night they burned a cinnamon tree. The smell was nothing short of intoxicating, other-worldly. With the weight of the climb behind me, I felt free to soak up the now, and now was very very good.
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