An October dawn, somewhere in the heart of the Amazonian rain forest. The first pastel colours spread across the sky; the peace of the tropical night is shattered by the exuberance of parrots and monkeys.
After talking all night, anthropologist Martin von Hildebrand and the most important Indian Cacique (wise man) on the river sit in silent mambeando (chewing coca leaf).
A message arrives: Dr von Hildebrand's Bogota office wants to talk to him on the community radio. They have been looking for him up and down the river for two days to tell him he has just won the alternative Nobel Prize for his work with the indigenous communities of the Colombian Amazon.
Tomorrow at the awards ceremony in Stockholm, the Nobel Prize committee will honour him and two Indian leaders who have travelled from the depths of the Colombian rain forest to tell their story to the wider world.
Ask Dr von Hildebrand why he has dedicated his entire adult life to the Amazon and he will say it is because it has allowed him to have dreams. Ask him why the Indians, and he will give the answer his friend the Cacique gave him: "That's where you get the energy of your life, that's why you always come back. You feed your soul that way'."
Dr von Hildebrand's mother, Deirdre Mulcahy, comes from a prominent republican family in Sligo; his father was the son of an Austrian Catholic theologian forced to flee the Nazis in the early 1930s. Dr von Hildebrand was five when the Hildebrand family arrived in 1949 in Bogota where his father founded Colombia's first private university.
He studied sociology at UCD (an older sister, Catherine, preceded him and married the late Breandan O hEithir), and he received his doctorate in ethnology from the Sorbonne University in Paris.
Back home in Bogota, Dr von Hildebrand adopted Colombian nationality. "After all," he says, "if you want to build something to try and create a better country, you had better belong to that country, don't you think?"
Dr von Hildebrand first made contact with the Amazonian Indians in 1972. That year he went alone into the forest, rowing his canoe along the beautiful river, taking notes, feeling as though he was slipping back into a previous century. At first, none of the Indians he met could speak Spanish, but communicating through nods and smiles they gave him food and appeared to welcome him.
Eventually he found a group who spoke some Spanish. When he said he was interested in their myths and their cosmology, they told him their stories; long stories that often lasted for five or six hours. Then they would ask: "And how is it with you?" He would tell them the Greek myths.
On that first trip he found the Indians were losing the battle to sustain their culture. Missionaries forced their children into white schools and rubber dealers were exploiting the adults. They had no time for their rituals, not even to bury their dead, and Indian community life was dying.
He spent two months in the rubber camps, getting up with the Indians at two in the morning to work the rubber, and at night they talked. "It became clear to me," he says, "that the Indians had ideas about where they wanted to go and what they wanted to do. They could analyse their problems, but there was nobody to listen to them or support them."
So he decided to fill that void. After five months in the forest he left, went to Bogota, and returned ready to start working. "I always had a feeling for ethnic minorities," he says. "Maybe my mother being on the Sinn Fein side of things and my father defending the Jews - maybe . . ." He had a plan, and it worked.
They set up their own community shops to exchange rubber for the basics they needed - fishing hooks, knives and flashlights. Then, when they had collected a ton of rubber, they sold it down river to Brazilian boats. Soon the price of rubber had doubled and the dealers left.
Between 1986 and 1990, as director of the Office of Indigenous Affairs, Dr von Hildebrand persuaded the Colombian president to give 20 million hectares of rain forest to the Indians (an area the size of the UK) so they could develop their autonomy in their collective territories and protect the rain forest from colonisation.
The decision was unprecedented, both in the scope of its recognition of the rights of indigenous peoples to manage their own territory, and in the official acceptance of their crucial role in the conservation of the world's fragile tropical rain forests.
Then, the London-based Gaia Foundation became involved. In 1990, Gaia raised European funding to establish a program with five small Colombian non-governmental organisations that field a team of experts to help the communities implement their autonomy, manage the rain forest ecosystem in accordance with their cultural norms, and deal with the outside world.
Today, the communities participating in this program have more control over their territories and their environment than any group in the Americas.
Theirs is also the only non-violent area in Colombia. "We work silently, in the shadow of the chaos," Dr von Hildebrand said recently. "Undoubtedly the Indians are a living example of peace, but peace is not an objective to try and achieve. Peace is a way of living, of organising, of listening to other people and accepting that people are different to begin with, so trying to come to terms. This is what Indians do."
He has been working so discreetly that very few know what he and the Indians have been up to, But the prize, and his ambitious agenda for the coming decade, will change that.