Girl Against the Jungle (1)The sun was already quite high in the sky when I started off the next morning. It was forever the same routine: tapping the ground with my stick walking cautiously, watching for spiders pushing aside the undergrowth. Wading into the water when the banks were impossible. I noticed that I lost some of my sweets through a hole in my bag, but because I was still not hungry I did not care. (2)Then I heard the vultures. (3)They were king vultures; I recognized them immediately. Where the vultures are, there is ususlly the flesh of corpses. I knew that they were eating the people from the crash. (4)I was, in fact, still in areas over which the wreckage of our plane was scattered. I saw a piece of the fuselage. The aircraft number was still recognizable, and then I came upon a bit of the wreckage that looked like the cabin with tangles of wire and bent sheet metal. (5)There was a smell of petrol, but no trace of survivors. I did not stop very long near the wreckage because I wanted to push on. Yet my progress was so painfully slow. (6)On the second day my injuries still did not hurt me, nor on the third. Instead my back began to hurt—it had grown badly sunburnt. The fastening at the back of my dress and through the trees the sun had caught me. In the Peruvian jungle the sun is as brutal as the rain—people from temperate climates of Europe are not equal to either of them. (7)But in spite of the pain on my back I covered much more ground on the third day, after a good night’s rest. I had the feeling that I had got stronger; though I lived on nothing but a few sweets and water. Of course, I was constantly bitten by mosquitoes and horse flies that were impossible to get rid of, but I did not care about that. (8)Then I did not notice the mosquitoes and flies any more, because I heard the sound of aeroplane. (9)I shouted. I knew it was useless and yet I was shouting. "Hello," I cried, and "Help!" again and again, "Hello, help!" (10)They must have been very close, but the pilots did not see me under the trees, of course, I couldn’t even see the planes and I had nothing that I could use to draw their attention to me. (11)The noise died away. I was alone again, but I was not too discouraged. I was able to walk, I was not hungry, I could drink from the clear river. There was still hope.