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Without a word, he shouldered his pack and started slicing anew with the machete.

An hour later, we reached the trail and continued onward to a log bridge. We stopped for a drink of water. John’s one visible eye was clenched shut.

“That was a mistake,” he said. It sounded like an apology, though whether to me or to himself I couldn’t tell.

“You know, we can go back to the hospital at Puquiura if you need to.”

“No, no, as long as the wound is clean we should be fine. Just pour a little water in it, would you?” He lay back, and I knelt behind him and dripped water from my bottle into his eye. I couldn’t help but notice we’d almost assumed the position of Michelangelo’s Pieta, with yours truly in the Virgin Mary role. John’s nose was still running from the pain. He winced as the water splashed into his eyeball, tilted his head up and blinked hard, then let his neck drop.

“That’s a . . . torrent duck . . . over there in the water,” he said, pointing into the white water below us as I tilted the bottle again. “Swims in the rapids.”

I nodded in agreement.

“I think . . . I think we may stop for camp early tonight.”

We walked on to our lunch rendezvous. Juvenal began to approach with his usual toothy grin but took one look at John, spun around and started to unpack the medical kit. John wanted the eyedrops, and I pulled out dozens of tiny boxes labeled in various languages searching for them. One was marked GOTAS OTICAS. Gotas, I knew from listening to bad Latin love songs in New York, were drops or tears. I remembered from my days working at a men’s fashion magazine that ottica was the Italian word for an eyewear shop. Italian and Spanish, as any professor of Romance languages can tell you, are pretty similar. Getting to my feet, I marveled at the human brain’s ability to pull together such disparate knowledge in moments of crisis.

“Make sure the bottle says ‘optica,’ not ‘otica,’” John said from his chair. “Gotas oticas are eardrops.”

I resumed the search.

We consumed our enormous lunch slowly. The four team members, who usually wandered off as we ate, sat nearby in a tight group, watchingus as they would a Ping-Pong match: John, Mark, John, Mark. They were trying to decide if Señor John was still up to leading the expedition, because if he wasn’t, Señor Mark was in charge by default. No one was very excited about that possibility.

“Well, at least the rain never came, right?” I said as we sipped our scorching hot tea in the midday sun.

“Sky was too clear this morning,” John said. “Too much heat too soon means rain. Should be a big one.”

Around one-thirty, the clouds that had bounced around the corners of the sky most of the day congealed and swelled. We put on our waterproof jackets and pack covers and waited for the deluge. It didn’t take long.

If I had to choose one word to describe the cloud forest in a rainstorm, it would be slippery. Dusty dirt trails swell into gooey mudslides. Rocks take on boot-repellant properties. Pretty log bridges over gurgling streams are transformed into menacing frictionless cylinders, plotting to hurl careless walkers into the white water below. The jungle’s warm breath fogs up eyeglasses and creeps underneath Gore-Tex jackets, creating portable steam rooms. Once everything is hecho una sopa—soaked like a soup—the temperature drops.

We stopped at a spot called Vista Alegre, which means “Happy View.” Everyone parked together under the roof of a three-walled hut, kidding ourselves that the rain might let up. The sky was the color of an anvil. John sat in the corner, head down, rubbing his forehead through the black bandanna. Justo, a man whose charms do not include subtlety, kept shooting glances at me as he babbled in Quechua, evidently explaining how I’d seen a man with bad eyes and neglected to take proper precautions. Overwhelmed by the musk of six unwashed men in close quarters, I wandered off to sit beneath the eaves of the only other structure within our not-entirely-happy view—a one-room wood shack. For a long time I watched the angry