Sole survivor: the woman who fell to earth
But falling from the sky was only the beginning of her troubles. The forest that had saved her life became her prison. She was now lost in deep uninhabited jungle with danger behind every bush.
There were jaguars, scorpions and poisonous snakes camouflaged as leaves, which she couldn’t see because she had lost her glasses. Equally unsettling were the rivers with piranhas and alligators. And December in the rainforest is wet. By day Koepcke was dotted with the black outlines of a hundred bugs. By night she was lashed with ice-cold rain.
Koepcke didn’t have any tools for survival such as a machete or plastic boots. She was just a girl in a thin cotton minidress with a broken zip and one white sandal (the other was lost in the crash and she decided that one was better than none), with nothing to sustain her but a bag of boiled sweets (which ran out on day four) and a simple belief that she had to keep going. But 10 days after the plane crashed, on January 3 1972, Koepcke was found by three forest workers.
It lacks the poetry and subtlety of a ghazal, but the children appear to enjoy it, clapping and humming along. "I wish they had somewhere to play," Sultana sighs. "Sometimes we just let them run up and down the corridors to get some exercise.
Birdlife along the way was lively but limited to several species of herons and smaller shore birds, as well as a couple of types of kingfishers. A few hours later, the boundary marking entrance to Nantu was obvious from a distance.