Something ran by me. I detected a smell, the smell of fish. The attacker moved so quickly that I couldn’t get a glimpse of it. Nora pulled up her bloodstained pants, her hands shaking. Someone screamed again: a woman and a middle-aged man from the cult had their ankles tied together with a rope and were being dragged towards the woods. They were both desperately trying to grab on to something, but their situation was hopeless. One of the cult members took hold of the woman’s hand, trying to pull her away from her attackers, but then a spear came flying, launched from the forest. The man screamed, his hand reduced to a bloody stump. We watched in horror as the woman disappeared into the woods. It’s a strange, unnerving feeling to know you’re being hunted, but to my surprise it also brought a sense of calm. I felt I was closer to my goal.

Someone had a gun.

Shots were fired in the chaos; I didn’t even know who was shooting, or at what. The attackers retreated, though none of the bullets hit them, or at least we didn’t find any bodies. Two of us were injured, however. The man with the mangled hand was hit in the thigh by one of the bullets; the other bullet pierced Jufus body. Our guide collapsed under a tree; he applied pressure to the wound, but blood was seeping out fast. His face grew pale. His lips trembled.

When the chaos had given way to cold contemplation of what had just happened we saw that the gun belonged to a Dutchman with a mustache. When he realized what he had done, that his shooting blindly might well have cost us our lives, he put the barrel of the gun into his mouth. He screamed when the hot barrel burned his tongue. It was an embarrassing moment of weakness, even he knew it, so he tried again. He quickly pushed the gun deep into his mouth, then pulled the trigger before he could feel the pain of his burning flesh. None of us tried to stop him.

Jufus was having difficulty breathing and his eyes had lost their focus. We held on to every second with him, hoping he would tell us which way to go.

‘It’s no use going anywhere,’ Jufus whispered. ‘The world moves in circles; there’s no way out. Time is a wall, time is prison, and you are a shell . . .’

He kept on going for what seemed like hours. Either he said the deepest things or he made no sense at all. There was just one thing he said that made sense to me. It was his last words to me before he died. His eyes were clear when he said it.

‘We’ll see each other soon.’

The sacrifice