The remains of Jim Jones' Peoples Temple rest deep in the Guyanese jungle, a 5-mile drive from the muddy river town of Port Kaituma, where jaguar skins dry on the front porches of thatched huts.
Now part of a 4 million-acre Malaysian and Korean-run timber concession, the site where more than 900 people died in 1978 in the worst mass cult suicide and murder in modern history is little more than a clearing in the forest, slashed in half by a new red-earth logging road.
Flies buzz around almond and breadfruit trees planted by Jones' followers. Rusty tractors, an old flour mill and fallen electrical insulators protrude from the grass.
The corrugated-roof pavilion, where the vat of cyanide-laced grape punch sat, has long since been torn down, scavenged for its wood and iron. Where it stood lies a tangle of thorny brush that hides, locals say, Jones' throne chair and the colony's rotting piano.
Jonestown is vanishing into the jungle, taking with it, some say, important lessons about the risks of blind faith.
"This kind of thing keeps happening," said Gerald Gouveia, a former Guyanese soldier and private pilot who flew Jones back and forth from his isolated colony, and who hopes to preserve Jonestown as a tourist attraction.
"We need to keep Jonestown alive as an example," he said.
In late March, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult in California killed themselves, intent on shedding their earthly bodies in an effort to catch a ride on a spaceship their leader believed was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
As similar apocalyptic cults prepare for the end of the millennium, cult researchers believe such scenes will be played again and again.
Jonestown remains the marker by which such tragedies will be judged.
On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 followers of Jones, a self-declared messiah in sunglasses, swallowed cyanide in the jungle commune where their "father," as they called Jones, had brought them to live in socialist and racial harmony.
Told that CIA-directed Guyanese soldiers were advancing on Jonestown to torture, murder and castrate them, the men, women and children of Jonestown-- nearly all Americans of various racial and ethnic groups-- followed a drill they had practiced many times before, swallowing glasses of sweet grape drink at Jones' command.
This time the poison was real. A tape recorder, left running at the scene, preserved the screams of the dying and the cries of those felled by guns and crossbows as they fled for their lives.
Jones, by all accounts a charming and manipulative socialist revolutionary with a growing sense of paranoia, moved his growing Peoples Temple commune from San Francisco to Guyana in the early 1970s, intent on escaping what he saw as police and media persecution.
Rev. Andrew Morrison, an aging Jesuit who in the 1970s ran Guyana's only independent newspaper, the Catholic Standard, began suspecting trouble at Jonestown in 1974, when Jones requested permission to use a Catholic church for what he said would be an agricultural lecture.
Instead Jones, who considered himself the reincarnation of Jesus Christ, performed healings before a packed crowd, producing bloody animal parts on hunks of cotton that he said were cancers pulled from the bodies of sufferers.
Morrison, horrified, began to investigate.
Over the coming years reports began coming in from Peoples Temple deserters of brutal conditions at Jonestown. Underfed followers were forced to work long hours in the fields. Spies reported any evidence of "negative attitudes" to Jones, who beat and humiliated followers who questioned him and sometimes buried them alive in underground boxes.
Escape was nearly impossible, followers reported. Armed guards patrolled the entrances. Jones had confiscated followers' passports and money and censored their letters home. Guyana's capital, Georgetown, is 140 miles away, through dense virgin rain forest.
In November 1978, U.S. Rep. Leo Ryan, accompanied by reporters and family members of cult initiates, arrived in Guyana to investigate allegations of abuses.
Jones ordered them not to visit. Ryan, a member of Congress from northern California, came anyway. After a tour of the compound, he insisted that anyone who wanted to leave should come with him. Twelve people stepped forward.
For Jones, "that was the signal everything was lost," Morrison remembers. "Jim Jones couldn't stand it."
When Ryan's party left, Jones sent a handful of armed lieutenants after them on a tractor, to the Port Kaituma airstrip. Five were shot dead, including Ryan. Others survived by playing dead or racing for the woods.
That evening, back in Jonestown, Jones called his followers together one last time.
Guyanese soldiers, sent to investigate the airstrip murders, arrived the following night after dark, tripping over obstacles on the ground as they crept near the center of Jonestown, Gouveia remembers. The obstacles turned out to be the bodies of Jones' followers--and of Jones himself.
Morrison heard the next morning, by radio, that he had been right about Jones all along. He, like most Guyanese, continue to see the tragedy at Jonestown as an international embarrassment.
Little effort has been made to preserve the infamous camp. A fence put around the site a decade ago has been torn down by scavengers. There are few visitors, apart from the occasional treasure-seeker lured by lingering rumors of gold and cash buried in concrete tunnels underground.
Gouveia, who owns a jet service, hopes to change that and begin bringing tourists to Jonestown. "This is bigger than Guyana. This has tremendous historic significance," he says. "I believe it's important Jonestown be restored and used as an example.
"The fact that we hide things like this from young people (ensures) they continue to happen again."