“No. We go deeper into the jungle. We’re stopping here for a moment to take a drink.”

It was hot. The position of the sun suggested that it was early afternoon, and Milton guessed the temperature was in the nineties. Del Pozo led the way into the nearest hut. It was made entirely from wood, from the walls to the roof and all of the furniture inside. A reservoir had been constructed from a sheet of tarpaulin suspended between four wooden posts that had been driven into the ground. Milton presumed that the water in the river had become too polluted to drink and that an alternative source had been necessary.

A set of wooden steps led up to a porch upon which an old woman was drying coca leaves. Milton nodded a greeting to her and continued through the door and into the hut. The accommodation was arranged as one large room with mattresses stacked up against the wall, and a hammock hung from two joists. Another room was hidden behind a closed door. The kitchen was part of the main space, the walls coated with soot that had risen from an open fire. An elderly man with rheumy eyes and weather-beaten skin pointed in the direction of the door.

Milton opened it and went through. The toilet was primitive—no more than a hole in the floor—and he relieved himself into it, then took a moment to look through the narrow slit that served as a window. The jungle was on the other side of the hut, with stands of ceiba and myrtle and laurel then, a little further away, tall emergentes that pierced the canopy and reached up for twenty or thirty metres.

Milton opened the door and went back into the hut. The woman from the porch was in the kitchen now, attending to something on the stove. She prepared a flask of coffee, the metal blackened from being exposed to the heat, and ladled out a bowl of lentils. The man cut slices of bread from a crusty loaf and handed one, and a bowl, to Milton. He took it outside and ate it, using the bread to scoop out the lentils. Del Pozo was sitting on the lowered tailgate of the Defender with Eidur next to him. The Mexican slid down and came over to stand next to him.

“The owner of this hut is Geronimo,” he said, gesturing to the building. “He runs the kitchen that we will be going to.”

“The kitchen?”

“‘Laboratory’ is too grand a word, but that is what it is. It is where the coca paste is prepared.”

Milton scooped out the last of the lentils.