Insinuating into a narrow inlet formed by a sandbar, the river laps at a portage concealed in the reeds: Six mooring posts arrayed west to east against the red-stained shore.  The undergrowth has been thinned and, remarkably, there are no midges, mosquitoes or gnats in the air about the inlet.<br/><br/>From the river’s inlet, the land rises gently into an orchard of grape vines.  Dryly lush, the tangle of the orchard holds snug to the yellow ground, sprawling for about half of a kilometer squared off.  It sweeps up towards the hills in the south, then turns east, bending back towards the river – forming a crusty semicircle of vegetation.<br/><br/>Within the orchard, grapes glisten like rubies under a shifting crowd of gold – bees that dip and spin in the air around them.  Out of the orchard’s western half rears a thirty foot tall wooden watchtower with a ladder leading up to its three-person sized nest.<br/><br/>In the bend of the orchard, the ground cleared for about thirty yards around it, is the squat clay shape of the outpost building, with a wheelbarrow and sledge sitting outside its single door.<br/>