Kipilefti

“You know what word I haven’t used since I got here?” asked Bret musingly as we made our way back down the mountain.

“What?” I said, paying more attention to placing my feet securely than to the conversation. Where we were walking, foliage often blocked our view of the ground, so this was a somewhat tricky proposition.

“‘Jungle'”, he said. “At home, I’d definitely call this a jungle”–he stopped speaking to push an enormous banana leaf out of his face–“but here it’s just a forest.”

“Huh”, I said consideringly. “You know, you’re right.” And he was: on the hike up we’d pushed our way through thick, wet vegetation strung festively with spiderwebs, leaves covering the well-used path, winding our way through groves of bananas and stands of papyrus. When we got to the top we reached a place where all the trees were totally covered by Spanish moss, presenting grizzled green branches to the world. Everything, in fact, was green, except for the profusion of flowers, orange and white and yellow and pink. No matter where we looked we saw glossy leaves, heard odd bird calls. The air was heavy with fecundity.