The Pinnacle villagers had warned me about the Earth People. Dangerous and unpredictable strangers to the coast, they were certainly no friends to a White. When I arrived in the fishing village to study local knowledge of health and sickness I had been told about the community established some nine miles away in Hell Valley. A week afterwards I saw three of them bartering ground provision for cutlasses in one of the village stores; they looked at me with surprise (I was the only White along the coast except for the two Irish Dominicans at Toco) and then ignored me. A few months later I took the opportunity of joining the villagers on a government forestry expedition into the bush near the Earth People, both to obtain medicinal plants, but also, it was evident, to visit the Valley.

One of the foresters had met Mother Earth on her march to town in the previous year and offered to take me. Leading away from the abandoned ajoupa (bush hut) which had served as our base camp for two days, the now disused track followed the headland, covered in fallen vegetation, coconut fronds, leaf mulch, forest debris. We forded a stream, overhung by a decayed footbridge, occasionally glimpsing through the overgrown scrub the remains of the wooden houses which twenty years before had comprised small hamlets along the shore, and climbed to a small plateau facing the sea, backed by the mountains which descended to behind the settlement and then on either side dropped down to a rocky bay some thirty feet below.