Return to camp suicide: 30 years on, could the nightmare of Jonestown happen again?
The jungle stretches out below our twin-engine plane like some vast, luxuriant carpet that seems to swallow up everything in its path.
Yet some events are so heinous that nothing can obliterate them - and the unspeakable horrors that unfolded here, 30 years ago next week, fall into that category.
Below us, on the northern tip of South America, 914 brainwashed men, women and children died in agony after poisoning themselves on the orders of a power-crazed cult leader who convinced them he was the Second Coming.
The place where they fell was Jonestown, a remote commune in north-western Guyana named after its founder, Jim Jones - the evil architect of this terrible tragedy.
He promised them it would be Utopia, but it became a mass graveyard. To Jones, their deaths were an act of ‘revolutionary suicide’. To those few who were fortunate to escape and tell their story, it was mass murder. History remembers it as the Jonestown Massacre - and, excluding acts of war and natural disasters, it was the biggest single loss of life in modern times.
The man who flew me there this week was among the first to have witnessed the nightmarish scene that remained after the self-inflicted carnage of November 18, 1978.
Now aged 53, Gerry Gouveia was an army pilot who had been sent on a reconnaissance mission the day afterwards, when the bodies were still scattered thickly across the ground. Thirty years on, the scenes he saw are still fresh in his memory as we fly above the jungle.
Having departed from the capital, Georgetown, we have been droning above the unbroken green canopy for almost an hour when he banks sharply left and swoops over an oval-shaped clearing. Here, there are no towering trees or tortuous creepers; just a sprinkling of sun-dappled daisies.
‘This is the place,’ Gouveia says grimly over the intercom. ‘When I first flew over here it looked as though someone had laid out lots of brightly coloured clothes on the ground. It was only when I dropped lower that I could see it was actually a mass of people.