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‘Rurrenabaque is on the banks of the Beni River. We reached it that afternoon. The Beni is much wider than the Tuichi and looked mild and placid, but the balseros told me that it is dangerous too. I clambered ashore and headed straight for the navy base. The CO was in a meeting with his senior officers, so I had no choice but to try to tell his secretary in my broken Spanish what had happened to me. She didn’t understand a word. Two Swiss priests who served in the area came over when they heard that a man had been saved from the jungle. They had another Swiss, who spoke English, with them. He translated what I said into German, and the priest then translated into Spanish, and that was the way my tale was told to the secretary. I asked her to place an urgent call to the Israeli embassy in La Paz, but she couldn’t do so as there were no direct lines, and I had to wait for the commandante to get out of his meeting.

‘The priests took me to their parish. For the first time in weeks I had a good hot shower. They gave me clean clothes and fed me. The nuns tried to console me for your loss. They told me that the Tuichi was known as a particularly dangerous river.

““Your friend surely drowned, and even if he did make it out of the river alive, his chances of surviving in the jungle were slight.”

‘No one in the entire town offered me any hope of finding you alive, but I just wouldn’t believe it.