The evening was velvet dark. The air was sweet with the scent of night flowers and filled with an orchestra of cicadas and tree frogs. Far off in the forest, I heard the whippoorwill-trill of a nightjar. Somewhere out there, close by, a jaguar was padding through the trees. She knew we were there. We’d seen her footprints in the mud, on the trail next to the river as we’d walked up; we’d smelt her acrid feline musk in the air. But jaguars steer clear of people, even on the flanks of Brazil’s Aracá, the wildest, remotest mountain in the tropics.
Here, untouched Amazon forest and river, lily-filled lakes, reed beds and swamps spread for hundreds of kilometres all around, unbroken by road or town. I wasn’t frightened, but my nerves were tingling. Tomorrow we would summit Aracá, a vast tabletop of cliffs and rock born when life on Earth was single-celled and the Amazon, Antarctica, Africa and Australia were all one continent. As we walked from the boat launch to the trailhead, its face looked as sheer and high as Ireland’s cliffs of Moher; as lonely and wild as a Southern Ocean iceberg. My muscles were tired from the hike to the camp. I’d eaten well and I was as snug as a bug in my hammock, but how could I sleep? After two years trapped by COVID-19 lockdowns, I was in life-giving wilderness, on an adventure I had never imagined. My mind was racing with excitement.
My fellow travellers, Rob and Raphael, were awake too. I could just about see their faces in the dying glow of our campfire, staring up through the forest canopy at the shimmering stars. They, too, felt a change. Since we’d arrived five days ago from a grey Heathrow, the weight of city life had been lifted from our spirits by the presence of seemingly endless nature, our bodies relieved of all tension by fragrant, oxygen-rich air and the world’s greatest flow of fresh water.
The first morning of our voyage, during one of the rainstorms that sweep across the northern Amazon, we’d put on our trunks, headed to the open area of
