Moving on. To try and go around the craters was as hopeless as going through for in places they were so close that they overlapped and the going was clear and open, when they ran out of clear ground the jungle was all the more impenetrable for obviously the damage was greater at the edges. There were whole trees, their root systems a  dirt-clotted reflection of their branches, lying horizontal way up in the canopy. There were places where everything leaned at the same angle of maybe forty degrees and you had to lean that way too to get through. There were places where leaves and branches and boughs and vines were so densely tangled and compressed that they formed a solid wall twenty feet high that you could neither squeeze nor chop your way through. You could visualise uprooted trees being thrown to one place one day, blasted over somewhere else the next. Sometimes we encountered upthrusts of boulders with sections that had been reduced to bright shale. Sometimes splintered tree trunks had impaled other tree trunks like giant spears. Every tree and bush had dumped all of its leaves on the ground, like a tropical autumn except the only colours were black and brown of rot. It was a sharp, jagged, nightmare place, like the world inside a pin cushion.

It was thought for some time that Trouble with Lichen was John Wyndham’s last novel, until it was discovered that he’d written a whole lot of other stuff published under various pseudonyms. In it he went into a lighter mode with the tale of a scientist who discovers immortality but holds back his great creation because he can see the possibilities of a downside. In fact, his work will extend human life but, ironically, he dies himself, refusing to jump the gun to save even himself. His girlfriend has other ideas and sadly learns the problem with living forever.