As we plunged ahead, crashing through impenetrable trees, prehistoric ferns, and tall, sharp grass, I mentally inventoried all of the leeches I presumed were collecting inside my boots and brushed imaginary spiders from my neck. Every few steps that seemed to yield little progress, I consulted the Gaia satellite app on my iPhone, its meandering path casting doubt on the route chosen by our guide, Anwar (“rays of light,” in Tamil).
“We need to be going DOWN,” I said, getting more irritated and not a small bit unnerved by the wild boar tracks and giant hornets’ nest we’d seen a while ago. I held up the phone for Gishani and Anwar to see. He nodded and smiled, not seeming bothered at all by the fact that our path wasn’t aiming towards the doubletrack dirt road that ran parallel hundreds of feet downslope from us. We crashed on, Anwar slashing at limbs and then stomping them flat under his calloused bare feet.
Suddenly, he stopped and held up his hand to stop us, pointing his curved blade at a nearby tree. There, at my eye level, no more than arm’s length away, was a coiled brown snake. Its tongue flicked in and out, its ancient reptilian eyes watching us. A catalog of venomous snakes of Sri Lanka flashed through my brain: krait, Russell’s viper, king cobra… Then I tried to remember the field treatment for a snakebite. Tourniquet? I had my belt. Suck the poison out of the wound? Would the leeches come in handy after all? The fact is, a bite from any of these vipers would mean necrotic flesh, nerve damage, paralysis, perhaps even death. There’s no way an evacuation was possible in the dense jungle on this remote mountaintop.
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