Peering closer, he could smell the jungle flesh, sense the snip and clicking of a million pincers, the red-toothed struggle for food and space and light, the strangler figs and probing root, the silent hunters and devourers, the broadcasting of cells and seeds and energy in mindless waste. And he saw for a moment what his deranged wife had seen in her agony of the day before, that in this place they were forsaken; then there swept over him the significance of the snake, and he groaned aloud and sank to his knees and prayed.
