The jungle was a miasma of feral shadows and blue streaks of moonlight. Plants India had never seen before bloomed luminescent in the dark. Greens, blues, purples. Yet the lights simply brought out more of the night. He found as time wore on he could only make out the lambent flowers, the flickering vines. Everything else began to seem as naught but some black ocean, an oblivion sea strewn with siren flora. Something upon which he imagined shapes of death as much as beauty: skulls gilded by petals, boas as big as trees and trees like holes in the world. Half-naked women with bared teeth and clawed hands and hissing serpents for belts. Slithering creatures as though caimans had mated with fish and frogs, their every joint home to a greedy, snapping maw breathing out billows of wet mist . . .

Everything was real, nothing was real. Demons in the dark.