(Photo: Cf.)

There are points where the river is so wide the distant shore appears to be little more than insignificant scrub, a slight, squiggly line of green. Sometimes, gazing up or downstream while in the middle of it, there’s hardly a horizon at all, just a vanishing point where water blurs into air and pools of refracted light distend from would-be horizon like pockets of nothingness.

They say the land of Amazonia is itself continental, a territory more expansive than Western Europe. Out from beneath its forest canopy, on the river, the sky, too, appears continental. Incomprehensibly vaster even than the big skies of flat, limitless prairie or savannah, due to the luminance of its equatorial light.

At either side of high noon, as the sun leans at the river rather than bearing down, there can be a different light and micro-climate apparent in every direction. Some kilometres downstream a storm gathers. Over there, nearer the banks, crisp, cerulean blue. Where we are, directly above, the clouds are maps, countries constructed of pure gas; I pick out the white-wooly British Isles, the chipped, downward pointing arrow-head of Africa. Gradually, the maps and territories dissolve, into renderings of picked-over fish bones and slumbering caimans. Then these too lose their shape, and the sky reveals itself as a transient canvas of forgetfulness and loss.