At first glance the camp was close to how I’d imagined it might be. There was a large, dusty clearing surrounded by the rocket-ship trees and dotted with makeshift bamboo huts. A few canvas tents looked incongruous, but otherwise it was very like the kind of South-East-Asian village I’d seen many times before. At the far end was a larger construction, a longhouse, and beside it the stream from the waterfall re-emerged, bending around to run along the edge of the clearing. From the straightness of its banks, it had obviously been deliberately diverted.
It was only after taking all this in that I noticed there was something strange about the light. The forest had been both dark and bright by turns, but here everything was lit in an unchanging twilight, more like dusk than midday.