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will lead us there. That's why we don't need an exact map.'

We started our ascent, and soon our bodies were pouring sweat. When I spotted a large, green fruit near my foot, I called out to Karl. He was pleased with the find – he called it manzana de monte (mountain apple) – and showed me how it broke evenly into four pieces, and handed them around.

‘Let's look for the tree,’ Kevin suggested, and in a few moments, when we'd found it and discovered the fruit too high above our heads and the trunk too smooth to climb, he said decisively, ‘Let's chop it down.’

Marcus immediately took the opposite view. It wasn't right, he argued, to kill a tree just to get at its fruit. ‘And what about other people who might pass by here and need food?’

‘We're here now,’ Kevin retorted, ‘and we're hungry.’

We took turns striking at the trunk with the machete. Kevin worked at it longer than the rest of us, and in no time the tree toppled with a crash, breaking branches off neighbouring trees on its way down. We pounced on the fruit and gathered up a good deal of it only to find that not a single one was edible. They were all green and hard inside. I thought we could take them along and eat them when they'd ripened, but the others disagreed; the burden wasn't worth the reward.

It took five long, exhausting hours to climb the steep mountainside. Karl showed us how to