For two days, Akasha Song had been riding in the passenger seat of a dusty Fiat truck through the desert-like shrublands of northeastern Brazil. The region, known as the caatinga, gets so hot and dry during much of the year that Brazilians sometimes call it the portaria do inferno, or “gatehouse of hell.” At the wheel was a man Akasha had met just the previous morning who spoke almost no English.
Akasha, a well-built 43-year-old American dressed in Lululemon athletic wear with a shaved head, a wild Rick Rubin–white beard, and big blue eyes, was delighted by all of it. He’d spent most of the drive listening to Phil Collins,
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