“Trillions,” Bill mumbled to himself, which he always found himself doing when reading that passage.

He thumbed to the middle of the book, where there was a series of glossy photographs. There were several pictures of Lefbrevor—thirty years younger and with a full head of dark hair—surrounded by indigenous people. On the fifth page of pictures was an image of a golden jaguar faceup in the dirt. And just below the golden jaguar was another picture: a jungle-cloaked pyramid.

Bill held the book up in front of him, the picture of the pyramid superimposed next to the actual pyramid. Even the angle was the same.

In his book, the ethnobotanist wrote that he’d stumbled across the golden jaguar and the stone pyramid in the middle of the Amazon jungle. Then after hiking for two more days, he encountered a tribe.

The legendary Nsé-Eja.

Approaching the Nsé-Eja’s village, Martin had been struck by one of the tribes’ poison-tipped arrows. He woke up in a bamboo cage, surrounded by war-painted tribesmen with yellow teeth filed to points.

Their shaman spoke bits and pieces of Portuguese—he said the language was “left over” from one of his previous lives—and he spent several days with Martin. Between explaining to Martin that they would soon remove his head and sacrifice it to their gods, then feast on his body, Martin was able to ask the shaman many of the questions he’d asked the other witch doctors with whom he’d studied.

When Martin asked about cancer, the shaman was confounded. He didn’t know what Martin was asking. In his fifty years as shaman and going back four generations of past shamans, they’d never encountered a villager with any growth, any protuberance, or any metastasizing mass.

Of course, the villagers didn’t autopsy their dead, and they could have confused the symptoms of cancer with another malady, but it had struck Martin as odd. So odd that on returning to his native Canada, the ethnobotanist wrote in his new book that the Nsé-Eja may be immune to cancer.

Of course, this had been after his escape.

According to his book, that happened on his seventeenth day of captivity. Lefbrevor’s death was just days away, earmarked for the full moon. While the villagers were sleeping, Martin was able to break free of his cage and flee into the jungle.

Without his pack, supplies, or compass, the ethnobotanist nearly succumbed to the jungle, but survive he did. For twenty-six days, before finally finding his way to a small village.