They ate lunch quickly and packed up ready to start the trek again. Molly looked back at the bridge they had just crossed and wondered why the trees had fallen in such a way as to form such a convenient handrail but decided to say nothing.
They walked for about three hours, constantly watching the compass and checking the map. So far, the map appeared to be accurate. It was mid-afternoon when they came to an area where the river widened, and they noticed the trees were markedly different.
“If I’m right, those trees are Palo Rosa! Rosewood!” said Molly in amazement. “A whole forest of them! They look like they have been planted as a tree farm and then forgotten about. That tree was thought to be extinct in the wild.”
She tapped the machete into the bark of one, which oozed a tiny amount of resin. She collected the resin on her finger, breathed in its perfume and offered it to Jonathan to smell. He thought it was the most beautiful smell he had ever known and breathed it in deeply.
“It was used for its beautiful wood, especially for guitars. And the resin is an essential oil which was used in perfumes. The Amazon species has a much more beautiful fragrance than trees grown elsewhere. The story goes that it was used in the most classic fragrance at the time, but the fashion house that made it refused to divulge their precious formula or to change it. The forests were plundered for the wood, for the oil from the tree trunks. Terrible waste, as the leaves hold even more of the beautiful scent than the wood. It was a tragedy that could have been avoided, but they wanted that scent as their secret ingredient for their precious perfumes. The scarcer it got, the more it was illegally chopped down. People started to farm the trees commercially, but they grow slowly, and they couldn’t keep up with demand. And by then it was too late to save the tree in the wild. We are looking at something very special.”
Jonathan walked into the trees. He caught hold of a low branch, snapped off a twig and inhaled the fragrance. He was touching an extinct tree. A glint of silver caught his eye. There was something metallic and he walked a little further in. From this point he could see tree stumps, but they had been cut. These weren’t old trees that had died and fallen naturally. The silver glints were from a small wood shredder and a barrel-shaped machine. He recognized it as machine used for steam distillation of oils. There were pieces of charred wood which must have been used to fuel the distiller. People had been here, recently.
Molly called to him a few times and he shouted back to let her know he was OK. He took photographs of the site, lots of them, and walked back to the trail.
They started walking again, keen to get away. They talked endlessly, in low voices, about who could be here and what they were doing with the wood and its oils. Jonathan clutched the small twig from the precious, extinct tree.