After Linden, the paved highway bec

After Linden, the paved highway becomes a wide, muddy track through the jungle, the Linden-Lethem road. Parallel, on both sides of the road, is the forest, dark, thick, foreboding, like a wall of green in the gloaming. It smells like rain and green and heat; it smells like life. Sometimes it shrinks to a thick fringe of foliage or secondary forest, at other times the trees rise above us nearly a hundred feet, culminating in green crowns.As the sun vanishes for large periods behind the sheltering canopy of the Guiana Shield rainforest, the road turns to shit, a pockmark of puddles, holes, and trenches.