Enthalpy

The ground was slippery beyond belief. I understand that jungles can present lots of difficulties to the unwary traveler but, while I was weary, my wariness had not been reduced since my arrival into this dark, leafy nightmare. We had been marching along in silence for three hours now, and the sunlight was just beginning to fade.

Jungles are dangerous at night. At all times, really. Everything in a jungle is vying for resources in order to stay alive, and it takes incredible focus and ruthlessness to pull it off. As I like to put it, everything in the jungle wants to eat you.

A snake dropped out of the trees above and onto the path right in front of me. At the same moment, a scorpion (unseen by me, but it must have been a scorpion) was whipping its tail towards my foot. The scorpion, as you are likely aware, holds enough poison in its stinger to put any large mammal into a painful catatonic state. This unbearable suffering typically ends in death.

The stinger raced towards my foot, but was blocked by the snake’s sudden fall. Snakes have fairly strong scales that protect them from malicious endeavors such as that perpetrated by my eight-legged attacker, and the stinger did not sting.

I, however, jumped backwards at the sight of the snake. As I did so, a large jungle cat leapt across the trail, claws and fangs at the ready, speeding through the very void in the damp jungle air where I had been standing.

This was altogether too much to handle within the space of a single second. My body began to make mistakes in its subconscious processing of space and time. A severe lapse in my proprioceptive abilities ensued, and I fell backwards thanks to the unstable ground. My head hit a sharp rock. It went dark, but not before I saw the sun gleaming beautifully in the leaves far far above me in the vaulted canopies of the trees.