Mittermeier is introduced, and he asks if I may put a question to the granman. I ask what the forest means spiritually to the Maroons. The granman passes my question to a captain, who says that it goes to "the heart of our society." Their whole existence, he says, is a result of the integration of the physical and the spiritual. Then he offers me a parable. If you go into the woods, he says, and you look for a new plot to farm, you have to put a marker down; otherwise you won't be able to find the plot when you return. He asks me, "What will be your mark, to ensure your return?" by which he clearly means, "Are you here for a moment or for the long haul?" It is the question no journalist wants to hear. I see that I am out of my league.

We go walking about the village, which looks like Africa in South America. What strikes one is how at ease the people are with themselves and their environment. They have a way of standing that seems to put no stress anywhere on their bodies, as if they have arranged all their parts to hang in perfect balance, like a mobile. Doing laundry or picking things up off the ground, the women bend not at the knees but at the waist, and with a fluidity that suggests there is no better way to bend. They do a musical performance, a seketi, in which they clap rapidly and make instruments of their hands. Their comfort is mirrored in their faces; their eyes are keen and uneager, yet charged with authority.

The women run the place. A mother in her early 30s with bright gold earrings and bright gold teeth talks teasingly with Mittermeier. He asks to take her photograph. She poses, sitting on the steps of her hut. As Mittermeier raises his camera, she gets a saucy look in her eyes, drops her colorful blouse, which was tied at her neck, and shows herself in full, confident power. Everyone laughs, but everyone also gets the picture.

We walk the hot, sun-splashed pathways of the village, past the wooden huts with ornate carved doors--they look like Swiss chalets--and a shrine, a flakapau, which displays blue wooden figures, the size of large chess pawns, that represent ancestors. A medicine man sits in his doorway; he cannot rise to greet us because his right leg is greatly swollen from a snakebite. He has treated his wound successfully. Some children follow us as we go, but most are too self-possessed to become groupies. When approached, they respond to questions politely, but mainly they seem to be studying us.

I watch Mittermeier watching everything. He is wholly comfortable here, and one sees why. There is nothing to be uncomfortable about in the villages, or in the surrounding forest, except some physical inconveniences. One calls this the wilderness, but it hardly seems wild to its residents. Pilgrims to America used to fear places like this; now people fear what has replaced them. I ask Mittermeier how all this affects him personally, apart from his sense of mission.

He tells me, "When you're alone in the forest, you're aware that life is everywhere around you. I feel a part of it. At the same time, I realize that I am just one more form of life in a very complex system. This is as close to a religious experience as I get--which is why, when I see a rain forest being bulldozed to make a few dollars for a logging company, I feel like I'm watching Notre Dame or the Louvre being hit with a wrecking ball. It's strange, but wherever I am in the forest, I feel that I'm home."

When he climbed to the top of the Voltzberg the other day, I, lacking the energy and the equilibrium, did not follow. Instead I sat at the base of the rock and stared into the soft and hazy thicket of the forest. I could not get the panoramic view, but I was able to take in the interior sounds and the overarching silence by which they and I were subsumed. Something momentous was about to happen, or had already happened, 10 million years ago. I could hear the air. Everything became important--the flesh of the leaves, the braided vines, a macaw overhead, the smallest insect. A bug the size of a piece of dust crawled across my hand as I wrote about it crawling across my hand.

After an hour or so, Mittermeier returned from what must have been his hundredth climb up the Voltzberg to gaze at the rain forest. "How was it?" I asked him. "Incredible," he said.