Even before I arrived, I knew that the ants here were bigger than the mammals. I knew that the evolutionary advances of certain local species shouldn’t be compared to those in parts of the world restrained by the presence of gods and men. Here, nature displays its brutality plainly. With no god to emulate or religion to follow, they confront their mirror madly . . . I looked at them, tried to choke back my disdain, and thought, What kind of god would want to live among them?

The palace of Tartare d’Hunval was sunk in darkness. Something not entirely of this world had colonized his journal entries: I feel that when I am writing, a dose of the fog takes me over. And he wrote of a strange presence at the gathering the night before: a corpulent man whose face he never saw.

Who could have stolen the glass chest? Absolutely anyone and everyone, but who? Tartare wrote, clearly irritated. He’d made a list of all those who were present. Could it have been Guillaume de Barbosa, the first to describe Stanhopea numinosa on Brazilian soil? He was there without a doubt, though no one can remember what he was wearing. Perhaps Arielus Languis and Karl Stu made off with it? No one had seen either of them leave. Or maybe the emperor himself? Everyone knew about his fondness for magical instruments—his collection of photographs rivaled the biggest in Europe.

This morning Tartare had asked Zizinho not to touch anything or clean up. He didn’t yet have a name, but at least he and Niklas could do what they did best—they collected samples. They put everything they found in a wooden bookcase with glass doors:

A very fine silk handkerchief stained with crimson lipstick; two reddish hairs; an invitation on which the smell of a perfumed hand could still be detected; scraps of cloth; and dozens of goblets from which people had drunk. To this day the collection serves as a reconstruction of life in their milieu. And considered together with the list of guests, it is clear testimony to Tartare’s interest in inner lives.

The following morning, still disfigured with rage at the loss of the glass chest, Tartare analyzed the samples with chemicals he had harvested. Meanwhile, who was that girl with the white skin and the worms? Both Niklas and Tartare had seen her in the course of their hallucinations: extremely pale, the worms adorning her arm, entering her veins below the humerus.

Then it was time for Tartare’s snail bath. Zizinho had gathered them earlier in the day, and placed them patiently all over his master’s tense visage. A few steps away, quite comfortable in his wooden armchair, Niklas ate an apple and read the journal of the local geographical institute. Most of the snails tried to find a way down off of Tartare’s face; a few of them nested contentedly beside his nose, leaving behind circular steles of themselves. With his eyes closed and one snail sliding across his eyelid, Tartare’s mouth never stopped moving. He proposed and then discarded several theories. He was certain that there had been nonhumans amongst his guests.

After lunch, the two men headed upriver. It was like returning to the moment of Creation, when vegetation surged up all over the planet. Niklas once again sensed the outlines of his own hallucination: the overgrown meadows, the taste of the swamp in his mouth. The meadows dissolved at the banks of iridescent streams, and trees stood out like castles, lowering their branches only to raise them again, lines of dense liquid vegetal matter uniting the earth and sky.

They pushed forward, and a cloud-like mist swathed the foliage; they could see nothing but a few trees that rose only to disappear like ghosts overhead, and a few rock pinnacles left behind as they descended toward the hidden crater. The law of mud reigned in all directions: wherever they looked they saw the swamp unfolding, a labyrinth of hidden hands, the forgotten hands of the enormous beings that shuddered beneath the river. Niklas closed his eyes to save the images, and his hand moved across the cover of his journal.

Everything speaks until we stop looking.

He noted the pink dolphins swimming alongside them; then for hours there was no other visible trace of animal life, only the towering trees rising up between the shadows and the clouds—terrifying. And suddenly they couldn’t see anything at all. The last sight Niklas would remember is that of Tartare descending slowly, knee-deep in the water, his pant legs pulled up to his thighs.