by Evelyn Waugh
Those who were were not encouraging. They were mildly excited at first when they learned that anyone who wrote books was coming to their country, and with that pathetic belief in the might of the pen which one continually meets in out of the way places, hoped that I should persuade the Imperial Government to ‘do something’ about local trade conditions. The country was stiff with gold and diamonds, they said, which only needed ‘development’. When I told them that I wanted to go up country, they lost interest. Of course there was always Kaieteur, they said, quite a lot of tourists went there; three or four a year; they believed it was very pretty when you got there but it cost a great deal and you might be drowned or get fever; or there was the Rupununi savannah; several white people lived there and even a white woman, but it cost a great deal to get there and you might be drowned on the way or get fever; besides it was only at certain seasons you could get there at all. I had far better winter in Trinidad, they said, where there was an excellent new country club, horse races and a lot of money about, or at Barbados where the bathing was unrivalled.
And to be honest I did gaze rather wistfully as each of the islands in turn disappeared behind us. The first was Antigua and, coming on it as we did after twelve days of unbroken horizons, it remains the most vivid – steep little hills covered in bush, a fringe of palm along the beach, brilliant blue water revealing, fathoms down, the silver sand of its bed; an old fort covering the bay; a shabby little town of wooden, balconied houses, its only prominent building a large plain Cathedral rebuilt after an earthquake, with shining towers and a good pitch-pine interior; inquisitive black urchins in the street; women in absurd sun hats, the brims drooping and flapping over their black faces, waddling along on flat feet; ragged Negroes lounging aimlessly at corners; baskets of highly coloured fish for sale – purple and scarlet like markings of a mandril; ramshackle motor cars; and in the churchyard the memorials of a lost culture – the rococo marble tombs of forgotten sugar planters, carved in England and imported by sailing ship in the golden days of West Indian prosperity.
It is significant that marble, that most grand and delicate of all building material, the substance of almost all sculpture, has today become the symbol of the vulgar and garish – the profiteers of Punch circa 1920, Lyons’ Corner House and the Victor Emmanuel Memorial; it is part of the flight from magnificence to which both the ‘ye-olde’-pewter-and-sampler aesthetic and its more recent counterpart, the ‘modern’-concrete-and-steel-tube, have given impetus. A broken column in the Syrian desert, an incised slab overwhelmed in the gross vegetation of the South American bush remain as spoors of something gracious that passed that way centuries before.
We stopped only a day at Antigua to put down passengers and cargo; one of the things we brought to the islands was holly for their Christmas decorations. It looked odd being tossed down into the lighters under a blazing sky, so completely dissociated from its traditional concomitants of Yule logs and whisky punch and Santa Claus stamping off the snow. But it was not my first Christmas in the tropics; I knew it all – the cablegram forms specially decorated with berries and robins, the puzzled native children before the crib in the Church, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on the gramophone, the beggars trotting hopefully behind one in the street saying ‘Happy Clistmas – me velly Clistian boy’; the prospect of hot plum pudding on a windless, steaming evening.
Blue water ends at Trinidad; there and from there onwards the sea is murky; opaque, dingy stuff the colour of shabby stucco, thick with mud sweeping down from the great continental rivers – the Orinoco, the Essequibo, the Demerara, the Berbice, the Courantyne; all along the coast their huge mouths gape amidst dune and mangrove, pouring out into the blue Caribbean the waters of the remote highlands. Later I was to tramp across part of the great continental divide, where the tributaries of the Amazon and Essequibo dovetail into one another, tiny cascading brooks, confusing in an unmapped country because they seemed always to be flowing in the direction one did not expect; I was to wade through them or scramble over them on slippery tree-trunks in the forest where they were ruby-clear, wine-coloured from the crimson timber; I was to paddle tedious days down them when they had become deep and black; leaving them months later, as I saw the water become blue and clear again I was to feel touched with regret, for they had become for a time part of my life. But now as we approached the mainland I only felt mildly depressed that bathing had ceased to be attractive.
Depression deepened as rain set in; a monotonous tropical downpour, always dreary, most monotonous and most depressing when one is on the water. We were already a day late and now we missed the tide by an hour and had to lie at anchor in the rain and a slight fog, waiting to cross the bar into Demerara. There was a lightship faintly visible a mile or so away. They told me without pride that it was a new one.
Next day, before noon, we arrived. The town lies at the mouth of the Demerara on the right bank; opposite are low, green mangrove swamps. Half a dozen small ships lay alongside the quay. We steamed up and then drifted down to our berth with the current. Low wooden sheds and low roofs beyond them; everything quite flat; rain streamed down ceaselessly; only the heavy reek of sugar occupied the senses.
Landing was simple. There was none of the jaunty cross-examination which usually greets a British subject when he arrives on British territory; an elderly Negro in a straw hat glanced at our passports; the Customs officers opened nothing; we passed through the sheds, which were full of bees attracted to the sugar bags, and out into the water-logged street; a taxi splashed and skidded to the hotel; the windows were obscured by rain.
A bare bedroom with white wooden walls, a large bed with mosquito netting, a rocking chair, a faint smell of ‘Flit’. There I was.
Two coloured reporters arrived from local newspapers to interview me. They had followed me on bicycles from the other hotel. (This, let me hasten to say, is no indication of fame. All first-class passengers are given column interviews on arrival at Georgetown.) They looked rather damp and had none of the breezy technique of their trade. They took down all I said laboriously as though I were a witness at an Archbishop’s Court.
Was it true that I was a writer? Yes.
A writer who had published books or just a writer?
Was I going to write about Guiana? One of them had a cutting from a London paper in which I had facetiously said that I understood the beetles in Guiana were as big as pigeons and that one killed them with shot-guns. Had I really come to shoot beetles, they asked. They were afraid I should be disappointed. The beetles were certainly remarkably large, but not as large as that.
Had I any views about the mineral resources of the country? When I confessed that I had not, they were clearly nonplussed; this was their stock, foolproof question, because most visitors to Georgetown came there with some idea of prospecting for diamonds or gold. They gazed at me with reproach. I volunteered the information that I was going up country.
‘Ah, to Kaieteur?’
I then inwardly took the vow which I very nearly kept, that I would in no circumstances visit that very famous waterfall.
It was December 22nd when I landed, and January 3rd when I left for the interior. Most of this time was spent in trying to make some sort of plans for the future. Christmas was both a good and a bad time for this purpose; good because most of the people from up country had come down to town for the celebrations; bad because they took the holidays seriously in Georgetown. Most of my information came casually from conversation in the hotel bar.
Few of the people I talked to had even the most cursory acquaintance with the bush, though most of them could name someone who at one time or another had been up to Kaieteur; they were mostly discouraging, half regarding the expedition as a mild and rather tedious picnic and half as a precipitate and painful suicide. In order to dispel the suspicion that I was after diamonds, I gave it out, as was indeed the truth, that I wanted to take photographs of the primitive Indians. Here again they were discouraging. ‘You’ll find them all playing gr
amophones and working sewing-machines. They’re all civilized now. We know what you want,’ they said with winks, ‘you want to take the girls naked. Well, your best plan is to go up to Bartika and get a few of the tarts there to pose for you. You can get the proper feather ornaments from the Self Help shop. That’s what the American scientific expeditions do.’ Across the Brazilian border I might find something to interest me, but not in Guiana, they said.
I had a note of introduction to a Jesuit missionary on the Takutu River. There were three Takutu Rivers marked on my map, but two were merely guesses, sketched in tentatively with dotted lines, while one was marked firmly as a place of known importance, so I assumed, correctly as it turned out, that this was the one I wanted. It ran through the furthest extremity of the Rupununi savannah forming the boundary between British Guiana and Brazil. Accordingly I made this my objective.
I was advised to go and see Bain, the Commissioner for the district, who by good chance was in Georgetown for Christmas. So with the Governor’s introduction I sought him out in the boarding-house where he was staying. He was a middle-aged, emaciated man, creole with some Indian blood. Like everyone else in the colony he had at one time worked gold and diamonds; like most other people he had also been a surveyor, a soldier, a policeman and a magistrate; he had lately returned to the last avocation which included most of the other functions. He received me with great kindness and vivacity, telling me that the Rupununi was the most beautiful place in the world and that anyone with a gift for expression should be able to make a book about it. He was himself returning in a day or two by the cattle trail as far as Kurupukari which was well on my way. He had a boat of stores leaving almost at once from Bartika which he expected to find awaiting him. He offered me a place in that.
‘It ought to get there before me,’ he said. ‘I do not know about the rains. Perhaps it will take four days, perhaps eight. But it must get there because it is full of barbed wire I need. Unless of course it’s wrecked,’ he added. ‘Mr Winter’s boat was totally destroyed in the rapids the day before yesterday.’
I had no idea where Kurupukari was, but it sounded as good as anywhere else. When I got back I looked for it on the map. Mr Bain had spoken very quickly so that when I found Yupukarri right up on the savannah I was highly delighted. It was not for two days that I found Kurupukari about a hundred miles away from it. Then I realized that I was in for a longer journey than I had anticipated, and trebled my order for stores.
I had no idea what I should need. Opinion was contradictory, some people saying, ‘Just take a gun and live by that,’ and others, ‘Don’t count on getting anything up country. The ranchers live on farine.’
I had no idea what farine was but I felt I should need something else. Mr Bain simply said, ‘You should be like me. I can go for days without eating – like a camel. That is the way to live in the bush.’
From that moment onwards I did not have an hour’s certainty of plan. It was arranged that I should take Tuesday’s steamer to Bartika and start in the boat on Wednesday; then I discovered by chance that there was no steamer on Tuesdays; wires were sent and the boat delayed until Thursday.
Then Mr Bain rang up to say he was sending a black policeman with me who was to act as my servant; that sounded all right until the agents rang up to say that now the policeman was coming there would only be room for 100 lb. of my stores. There was nothing to do except countermand three-quarters of them.
Then the agents rang up to say, did I realize that it was an open boat and that since the rains were on it was imperative to take a tarpaulin. Desperate and unsuccessful attempts to secure a tarpaulin with every shop in Georgetown closed.
Then Mr Bain rang up to say that the agents said it was an open boat and that the rains were on. I should be soaked to the skin every day and undoubtedly get fever and he could not take the responsibility of sending me in it.
Then I went to see Mr Bain and he said I had better come to Takama with him and perhaps there would be a horse to get me to Kurupukari.
Then I rang up the agents and said that since the boat was relieved of my weight they were to put all my stores on board.
Then Mr Bain rang up to say that he had come to the conclusion that I could have the horse which he had meant to pack with his personal stores; instead he would send them by boat.
Then I rang up the agents and said they were to take from my stores the weight equivalent to the personal stores Mr Bain was sending by boat.
All these, and other less remarkable alarms, occurred at intervals of two or three hours. Taken all in all it was a disturbed departure.
There was plenty going on in Georgetown that week.
An unknown Dutchman shot himself on Christmas morning in his room at the rival hotel, on account of feeling lonely.
A Negro known to his friends as ‘the Blood of Corruption’ was arrested on numerous charges. He was the leader of a criminal organization called ‘the Beasts of Berlin’. They had taken the name from a cinema film; none of them had the remotest idea what Berlin was; they just liked the name. But they were perfectly serious criminals for all that.
There was a race-meeting in heavy rain and, on New Year’s Eve, a large number of dances. At my hotel there was a Caledonian Ball, characterized by a marked male predominance, pipers, and quite elderly men sitting giggling on the ballroom floor; there was also a more decorous function at the club where I ate the poisoned ‘crab-back’.
Through all this the preparations for the journey up country, the buying of chlorodyne and bandages, gun caps and cartridge cases, flour and kerosene, seemed fantastic and unsubstantial, and the empty forest, a few miles away, infinitely remote, as unrelated to the crowded life of the coast as it was to London. Most journeys, I think, begin and all end with a sense of unreality. Even when eventually I found myself in the train for New Amsterdam, sitting opposite Mr Bain, with our improbable baggage piled up round us, it still required an effort to convince me that we were on our way.
It is said that the railway along the Guiana coast is the oldest in the Empire. It runs in pretty, flat country over creeks and canals and through gay, ramshackle villages. The stations still bear the names of the old sugar estates, but these are mostly split up now into small holdings growing coconut and rice. The further one goes from Georgetown towards New Amsterdam, the blacker become the inhabitants, of purer Negro type and more cheerful manners. Berbice men look on Demerarans as wasters; the Demerarans look on them as bumpkins.
It was just dark by the time Mr Bain and I reached New Amsterdam. We had the carriage to ourselves and our baggage. Most of the way Mr Bain talked.
I do not know how the legend originated that the men who administer distant territories are ‘strong and silent’. Some may start strong and even retain a certain wiriness into middle life, but most of them, by the time they have attained any eminence in the King-Emperor’s service, are subject to one or more severe complaints. As for their silence, it seems to vary in exact inverse ratio to their distance from civilization. For silence one must go to the young diners-out of London; men in the wide open spaces are, in my experience, wildly garrulous; they will talk on all subjects – highly personal reminiscences, their dreams, diet and digestion, science, history, morals and theology. But preeminently of theology. It seems to be the obsession waiting round the corner for all lonely men. You start talking bawdy with some breezy, rum-drinking tramp skipper and in ten minutes he is proving or disproving the doctrine of original sin.
Mr Bain, though indefatigable in his duty, was not strong; frequent attacks of fever had left him bloodless and fleshless, and besides this he suffered from constant, appalling bouts of asthma which kept him awake for all but an hour or two every night. Nor was he silent. During the stimulating fortnight I was to spend in his company he talked at large on every conceivable topic, eagerly, confidently, enthusiastically, not always credibly, sometimes scarcely coherently, inexhaustibly; with inspired imagination, with dizzy changes of thought and rather
alarming theatrical effects, in a vocabulary oddly compounded of the jargon he was accustomed to use among his subordinates and the longer, less habitual words he had noticed in print. As I have said he talked of everything at one time or another, but mostly either in metaphysical speculation or in anecdote. He himself always figured prominently in the latter and it was in these that his gestures became most dramatic. The dialogue was all in oratio recta; never ‘I ordered him to go at once’, but ‘I say to him “Go! plenty quick, quick. Go!”’ and at the words Mr Bain’s finger would shoot out accusingly, his body would stiffen and quiver, his eyes would blaze until I began to fear he would induce some kind of seizure.
One engaging and lamentably uncommon trait in Mr Bain’s reminiscences was this, that besides, like half the world, remembering and retailing all the injustices he had encountered, he also remembered and retained every word of approbation; the affection he had received from his parents as a boy; the prize given him at school for his geometry; the high commendation he had had at the technical college for his draughtsmanship; numberless spontaneous expressions of esteem from various acquaintances throughout his life; the devotion of subordinates and the confidence of superiors; the pleasure the Governor took in his official reports; testimonies from delinquents to the impartiality, mercy, and wisdom of his judicial sentences – all these were fresh and glowing in his memory and all, or nearly all, I was privileged to hear.
Many of his stories I found to strain the normal limits of credulity – such as that he had a horse which swam under water and a guide who employed a parrot to bring him information; the bird would fly on ahead, said Mr Bain, and coming back to its perch on the Indian’s shoulder whisper in his ear what he had seen, who was on the road and where they would find water.
