“What’s your point?” asked Rad.

“It’s not much time, that’s my point. We’ll get a little way in and then have to turn around. There’s no way we’ll get anywhere near the middle of the island, which was where the smoke appeared to originate.”

“It’s still worth a look,” Jacky said. “And like Rad said, it beats walking in the sun.”

“What I’m saying,” Marty said, “is why don’t we just give up the wild goose chase and turn back now.”

“You can go back, Marty,” Rad said dismissively. “We’ll meet you at the dinghy. Jacky and I are going to check out the jungle.”

With that, they descended the lee side of the dune, disappearing into the thick vegetation.

Exhaling heavily, Marty followed.

∆∆∆

Tropical rainforests are often incorrectly referred to as jungles. The actual ‘jungle’—tangles of overgrown, impassable vegetation—exists only at the margins of the rainforest, where the woodland has been knocked down by natural events (such as hurricanes or typhoons) and replaced with dense, ground-level flora. This was true of the rainforest on Demon Island, and the jungle fringe would have been impassable had it not been for the dirt path Marty, Jacky, and Rad were following.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t too long before the belly of the rainforest opened up, a consequence of the canopy depriving sunlight from reaching the forest floor. Small shrubs, ferns, and palms managed to thrive in the shadowy world, as did the moss, herbs, and fungi that coated the spongy ground and decomposing deadfall in shades of green. Higher in the dark understory, flowering plants such as orchids and bromeliads, as well as edible fruits, flourished. Vines and leafy creepers snaked their way up giant buttress roots and ancient tree trunks, searching for a way out of the gloomy dungeon in which they’d sprouted. Woody lianas, some hundreds of meters in length and as thick as telephone poles, coiled in gravity-defying loops from tree branches, linking them together to create a canopy superhighway for arboreal animals.

On first glance, the dusky emerald forest seemed tranquil and harmonious. In reality, a ruthless, invisible war was taking place, only at a pace too slow to see with the naked eye. Some species of trees regularly dropped their fronds and branches in an attempt to rid themselves from the freeloading, light-stealing lianas; other species swayed out of phase from their neighbors to snap the smothering vines and creepers; and still others had evolved peeling bark to shed cumbersome epiphytes, or produced toxins to ward off infestation by pests. Yet perhaps nothing illustrated the dog-eat-dog world better than the giant, prehistoric-looking strangler figs, parasites whose aerial roots encased their host trees in a living mesh, squeezing and killing even the largest victims before growing over their corpses to become colossi themselves.

Marty called a break before one such strangler fig, its roots merged into stout pillars as thick as English oaks. He swatted at a wasp flying uncomfortably close to his head. The drone of its wings was especially loud in the still, hushed forest. The silence was unnatural and disturbing; it was the silence of being watched by unknown eyes, as if all the creatures of the forest had stopped whatever they were doing to take stock of the interlopers.