📸 Photo

spread out on the rocks, and I had no palm fronds for shelter. I laid the rubber bag over my face but still shivered with cold. I slipped into fantasy and was particularly tormented by one dream: a cheese-and-onion omelette in the old-folks’ home in La Paz. I couldn’t get that sizzling skillet out of my mind, and my empty belly howled for food.

I was so immersed in my daydreaming that I didn’t notice that the sun had come up. I shook myself with a start, but it wasn’t the light that commanded my attention but the sound of helicopters. I could hear the roar of the propellers. My heart in my mouth, I sat up, excited and expectant, waiting for the noise to grow louder and for the helicopters to appear, but I soon realised that it was all in my feverish imagination. I sank back down on the plank, bitterly disappointed. It was Sunday, the twentieth of December. I had been alone in the jungle almost three weeks. Tomorrow help would arrive, tomorrow, the twenty-first of December. They would have to come looking tomorrow, and if not tomorrow, then the next day, Tuesday, or maybe Wednesday. But Thursday would be the twenty-fourth, the day before Christmas, followed by a long weekend, so that meant that if they didn’t find me by the twenty-fourth, they wouldn’t look anymore after that. In another week I would have been alone in the jungle an entire month, and no one would believe that I was still alive. I myself didn’t believe that I could survive until then. My brother, Moshe, was the