They start working their way up the riverbed. Randy’s GPS indicates that Golgotha is less than two thousand meters upstream. The river begins to develop proper banks that get steadily higher and steeper. John Wayne clambers up onto the left bank and Jackie Woo onto the right, so that the high ground on either side will be guarded, or at least reconnoitered. They pass back into the shade of the canopy. The ground here is some kind of sedimentary rock with granite boulders embedded in it from place to place, like mixed nuts in half-melted chocolate. It must be nothing more than a scab of congealed ash and sediment on top of an underlying monolith of hard rock. Those who are down in the streambed move very slowly now. Part of the time they are down in the river, struggling upstream against a powerful current, and part of the time they are picking their way from boulder to boulder, or sidestepping. along crumbling ledges of harder rock that protrude from the banks here and there. Every few minutes, Doug looks up and makes visual contact with Jackie Woo and John Wayne—who must be contending with challenges of their own, because sometimes they fall behind the main group. The trees only seem to get higher as they work their way up into the mountains, and now their height is accentuated by the fact that they are rooted in the top of a bank that rises above the stream two, five, ten, then twenty and thirty meters. The bank actually overhangs them now: the river’s gorge is a tube mostly buried in the earth, open to the sky only through a narrow slot in the top. But it’s close to midday and the sun is shining nearly straight down through it, illuminating all of the stuff that makes its way down from the heights. The corpse of a murdered insect drifts down from the upper canopy like winter’s first snowflake. Water seeping from the rims of the overhanging bank forms a drip curtain, each drop glittering like a diamond and making it nearly impossible to see the dark cavity behind. Yellow butterflies weave among those falling drops but never get hit.