Standing in the bed of a pickup truck, the wind howls in your ears and deafens you. With your head in the wind it feels like you are submerging your head in a fast-flowing river, and the air tastes like water.

We watched as clouds rolled over the eternal mountains and poured rain down on the distant slopes. The setting sun through the rain and the clouds bloomed into a fiery sunset before night overtook us. It was solemn and beautiful. The word “timeless” kept coming to mind. We watched it in silence. The Olmecs had watched the same thing unfold when they lived in this jungle, and it inspired their pyramids. I don’t care what reasons scientists and anthropologists may give us for as to why they made those impossible feats of manpower and engineering. They made them because they saw those mountains; they saw the timelessness in them. The pyramids are a race’s reaching for immortality, and they got close.

After the smoldering sun had sunk below the farthest mountain, the jungle began to speak. Everywhere I have been there is a different noise at night, whether it is crickets, or the silence broken by the crashing of ocean waves, or even just the way cars sound when they pass. But here, the jungle screams at you. It is all of the animals, all at once, shouting just as loud as they can. It is overwhelming. You fly by sections where insects scratch a rhythm into the air, or other times you pass parts where you hear mostly whistling birds or screaming cats. I haven’t any idea what made most of the noises. But it was the soundtrack to our ride, and it made it wild. The truck weaved through the winding roads, dodging the vines that reached down and snatched at us. We shouted as kamikaze beetles ruptured on our faces. The air through which we passed was not the clear, thin substance that we are used to. It had a color, and it had weight. It was opaque, jet black and thick with humidity and various flying insects. Standing in the bed with our hands steadying us on the cab, the only thing that pierced the black air was the light of the headlights, and even that was choked out and smothered by darkness before it got 25 feet from the car.

When we got closer into the city and the driver slowed down, the wind and jungle also became quieter. We began to pass stores and houses. Aaron and I whistled at the groups of kids talking in the cones of yellow light under street-lamps. Sometimes they shouting things at us and we shouted back but we didn’t know what they were saying.