Wild Coast Read online

  ‘Jones said he would do better things for them,’ said their sister. ‘They all changed their name to Jones and called him Dad. I think they were happy at first, but we weren’t always allowed to see them.’

  Suddenly her eyes filled with tears.

  ‘After it all happened, I went up to Jonestown to look for them. I’ll never forget that day. By then, the dead were all black and swelled to a size. I tried to find Baby George and the others, but I couldn’t stomach the smell, and I had to leave. I’ve always imagined that they died in there, but I’ve never known for sure. My mother never recovered from the loss of my brothers and sister, and died soon afterwards. I’d give anything to have them back again. They were beautiful children. I often wonder what happened to their bodies. Someone said they were buried there, but how can anyone tell? Sometimes I feel that they’re still here, and that’s why I stay. I don’t ever want to leave them.’

  But Baby George and the others were no longer here, or even in Guyana.

  Later I discovered what had probably become of them. In death, the Amerindians had travelled further than they’d ever dreamed of in life. There were perhaps eight of them altogether, including the pseudo-Joneses, and they’d all have been scooped up in the great American airlift. In Georgetown this great, long-dead expedition was disembarked and packed onto transports. They were then flown to Dover in Delaware, where they sat for months in giant refrigerators built for the Vietnam dead. During this time they were fingerprinted by the FBI and then worked over by some thirty-five pathologists and twenty-nine morticians. By the end, it was still a mystery who everybody was. Once the relatives had retrieved those they wanted, a bewildering 410 bodies remained behind. Of these, sixty didn’t seem to have any ties at all.

  For the Amerindian Joneses, there was still another journey ahead. Boxed up with all the other unclaimed bodies, they were flown to California. There they were buried in Oakland, in a large, unceremonious mass grave.

  As I flew back to Georgetown, I tried in vain to make sense of all I’d seen. Way below, the forest heaved and blackened like unsettled sky. Great whorls of green gathered together, swelled up, reshaped themselves, formed into vast billowing, black masses of chlorophyll and then burst, swirling off into the distance. Perhaps Jonestown was like this, I thought: not something made, but a series of random patterns. Take away any single feature from the whole – the diseased prophet, the badlands, the broken discipleship, the bush and the threadbare state – and the landscape would have looked completely different. In fact, Jonestown would probably never have taken shape at all, and the endpiece vanishes altogether.

  But not everyone sees it like this. For many, particularly in America, Jonestown has an inevitable quality, and there’s almost a straight line between the promiscuous ’60s and the tubs of grape-flavoured cyanide. This is to say nothing of the belief that sinister agencies had somehow hustled the tragedy along. Every day on the internet more undergrowth is added to this jungle of myth. Some of it is planted by the descendants of the Temple, but the rest is seeded more despairingly, by those who insist that, in the absence of God, it’s some human authority that determines our fate.

  For the Guyanese there had been no patterns about Jonestown, and nor had it sat at the end of a line. As far as they were concerned, the whole thing had appeared from nowhere, like a visit from Outer Space. But they also knew that, whether they liked it or not, that day had changed them. ‘For months afterwards,’ said Joe, ‘the eyes of the world were upon us.’

  But what those eyes had seen had not always been easy to understand: private armies, stacks of Thorazine, a semi-feral theocracy, trunks full of cash and a Ministry of Hoods. After that, the great South American African Forbes Burnham had never quite regained his composure. Was he really a great liberator, or just a despot from the swamps? Six years later he found himself in the middle of a self-made famine, and – without any antibiotics – he died from a cough. It was the end of the African years, and the beginning of Indian rule. In 1992 Guyana held its first untarnished election for thirty years, and an ailing Cheddi Jagan was hoisted into power.

  Jonestown could now be forgotten.

  Back in Georgetown the events of 1978 still had people swooning with denial. Even the rebellious Dr Roopnaraine added his voice to the chorus of indignation.

  ‘It was an American matter,’ he told me, ‘nothing to do with us.’

  But, despite this energetic case of amnesia, Jonestown had proved difficult to bury. Every year, the Stabroek News would unearth the facts and parade them over its pages. It was almost as though readers needed reminding that the Temple was part of their story. Some joked that it was the only part. I once spotted a T-shirt in Stabroek market that depicted a map of Guyana under the heading ‘Sights of Interest’. All it featured was Jonestown, marked with a skull and crossbones.

  I sometimes wondered if the government had taken this taunt to heart. Only a few years earlier the Minister of Tourism had suggested that Jonestown be re-opened, to promote ‘dark tourism’. In fairness, every other scheme had failed (including a refugee camp for the Indochinese). But tourism? I remember asking my driver, Ramdat Dhoni, about this soon after my return. Was it his cup of tea, a resort for the chronically morbid? Would he be booking his grandchildren in, and his son, and Mrs Dhoni?

  ‘Don’t shit me, man,’ he giggled. ‘You been too long in the bush …’

  Had I? I suddenly realised that I’d only been away for a week. It felt like months. Perhaps that was the effect of the bush, to render time endlessly elastic? Perhaps that’s what had finally toppled Jones’s sanity, an affliction like Dorian Gray’s? This was not a particularly comforting thought as I contemplated my next move. The following day I’d be heading off – back inside – this time far deeper than before.

  3

  THE GOLDEN RUPUNUNI

  The Empyre of Guiana is directly east from Peru … and it hath more abundance of golde then any part of Peru, and as many or more great Cities …

  Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich,

  and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana

  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 a fever.

  Evelyn Waugh, 92 Days

  Ants in Guiana are very numerous, various and troublesome. They form themselves into a kind of a republic, governed by laws, like those of Europe.

  Edward Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History

  of Guiana in South America

  We stood on the borders of an enchanted land.

  Robert Schomburgk, Reisen in Britisch Guiana

  THE RUPUNUNI SAVANNAHS are the wrong side of a forest several hundred miles wide.

  Even by South American standards, this forest is overwhelming. There are parts that have never been properly charted, holes that have never been plumbed and lumps that have never been climbed. As for what’s under the canopy, most of it has lain drenched in uninterrupted darkness for tens of thousands of years. New creatures are always turning up here, and, if trucks and planes get lost, they often vanish for ever. There’s only one road through, and from the air it looks like nothing more than a tiny, bright red scratch. Meanwhile, the rivers are either huge and spectacularly violent – like the Essequibo – or thin and slinky, carnivorous and black.

  Then suddenly the forest ends. It’s like flying out of the night and bursting into sunlight. Ahead stretches a great, golden grassland the size of Scotland. This, of course, is only the wrong side of the forest if you feel a need for the outside world. The Rupununi doesn’t. It is its own world, a fabulously impenetrable land, viciously defended by forests, and – at the southern end – walled in by some of the oldest mountains on Earth. These are said to be the last flat-topped columns of a lost super-continent, Pangea. It’s not surprising that they should end up here, on this vast ocean of straw, where the lilies grow five feet wide and all the trees are
armed. Even the animals feel curiously Jurassic. Here are the world’s largest ants, otters and anteaters, and its biggest fish – the arapaima, a bearded monster as big as a horse.

  All this makes the Rupununi’s humans look rather vulnerable and small. Throughout the entire land there are still only 30,000 people. Some squares of the map are completely empty except for lumps of yellow and the names of dried-up explorers. No European managed to settle here until 1860. Even then, the only way in was on foot or by canoe. It remained like this until the age of the Dakota. There are still a few around who remember the gruelling journey – four weeks paddling upriver and then a couple of weeks on foot.

  I soon realised that I didn’t have the time (or the sanity) for a month in the Guyanese gloom, and so I did what the locals do and hopped on a plane.

  The place where the plane dropped me was like the setting for a novel by Evelyn Waugh.

  Annai, with its little grass village, was often said to be the gateway to the Rupununi. Out there on the savannah the horizon was so wide and bowed that it took me a moment to take it all in: an unearthly half-finished land, rimmed with mountains like purple teeth and dappled in brilliant birds. Sandpaper grew on trees, and the anthills looked like hooded monks emerging from the earth. I’d heard that during the rains it all turned to glue, but that then the waters would recede, and once again it would be what it was now, a sea of thorns and light and bony lagoons. To Waugh, who passed through here in January 1933, it was ideal, like a punishment from heaven.

  I could almost imagine him pounding along, kicking up the dust. He looked unhappier than ever in his outsize shorts, ill-fitting boots and a brand new homburg hat. The Rupununi came at a bad time for Waugh. The failure of his marriage had left him shrivelled with rage and shame. All he seemed to want was to suffer, to find some distant and barbarous place, and to go there and hate it. Eventually he chose Guiana – not that he cared much about it. This was not supposed to be a voyage of enlightenment but a punishment. Even the book he wrote, 92 Days, sounds like a sentence. He arrived that new year, and after hating Georgetown (too big, too dull, too much sugar), he set out to hate the interior. ‘It is by crawling on the face of it,’ he wrote, ‘that one learns about a country.’

  At one level, Waugh’s Rupununi journey makes an unedifying read. He’s a fractious travelling companion, always moaning about poor gin-swizzles, servants, children and ‘revolting meals’. No one escapes his withering scorn. But perhaps hardest hit are the Amerindians. Waugh despises their ‘blank Mongolian faces’, their ‘stupidity and lack of imagination’ and their ‘nauseating hospitality’. One Patamona woman he describes as ‘slatternly and ill-favoured even for one of her race’. The Guianese had not been described like this for years. It was, as one biographer put it (generously, I thought), a ‘pre-Columbian and pre-enlightenment view of the world’.

  But at another level his book is unmissable. Despite his pique and prejudice, Waugh is a master craftsman, deftly capturing character and sculpting the moment. Remarkable too is his journey, a slog of hundreds of miles, most of it by horse. Along the way he samples every variant of Guyanese discomfort: fevers, saddle sores, boils, rashes, ‘deep and tenacious’ ticks, and bites ‘like circles of burning flesh’. Somehow he makes an art form of it all, and – as a work of mortification – his ordeal is a triumph. But there was even better to come. Among all his fears of being forgotten and lost, Waugh dreamed up a masterpiece, A Handful of Dust.

  My host in Annai might easily have tumbled from the pages of Waugh. Colin Edwards had something about him of the caricature. He was a sort of broad, ruddy, bouncing squire – half Welsh, a bit Basque, wild in his dreams and loud in reproof. He told me he’d arrived as a road-builder twenty-odd years before. It was he who’d bashed the long, narrow road through the forest. ‘And I’ll tell you something,’ he’d say. ‘It was me who linked this country to South America.’

  ‘And was that a good thing?’ I said, half joking.

  ‘My dear chap, of course! Stopped our absurd reliance on the coast …’

  No doubt Colin would have carried on bashing trails through the continent but for these savannahs. The very sight of the Rupununi had transformed him from a man of the roads to the lord of the manor. He’d married the daughter of a local chief, imported his ageing parents and settled down in a large crumbling mansion shaped like a crown of thorns.

  It had been a curious transformation, like a journey back to a long-lost age. Rockview now had rooms for travellers, a pet tapir and a shop called the Dakota Bar, which sold rum, bras, cutlasses and ‘Anglo’ spam. Meanwhile, the wilderness had been marshalled into tidy rows – limes, mangoes and breadfruits – and a small army of liveried Amerindians kept everything brushed and polished. There was even a little cemetery nestling herbaceously in this scene of content. It contained Colin’s parents, a dog killed by a snake, the wreckage of a visiting helicopter and the man who’d built the house of thorns. As to this, his strange spiky home, it had hardly changed at all – except for the library, where a vast collection of leathery classics was now being enjoyed by the weevils.

  All this would have appalled Waugh. Rockview was like something from a latter-day version of A Handful of Dust, with Colin recast as the new Mr Todd. It wasn’t just the incongruous mansion, the Welshness of the tribe or the half-eaten books, but the whole idea of perpetuity. To Waugh this would have been unspeakable. Here was a man, not unlike himself, who’d stumbled in on this raw, uncivilised land, and who would now probably be here for ever.

  From Annai, I went to stay with a hunter, who lived deep in the grass. To get there, I hitched a lift with a chief called Bradford Allicock. He was a thoughtful man, with skin the colour of ox-blood, and with an old school bus, covered in go-faster stripes. Riding along with him was like flying, except without the wings. Soon we were blasting across the savannah, following the edge of the forest. On the horizon I could just make out a grass fire, fizzling along like a gunpowder fuse. Then we dropped down and swooped in among the trees. This was the vicious vanguard of the forest beyond: trees sprouting daggers and poison, or – like the water cedar – densely bristled in cocktail sticks, each one brittle and black. Then eventually we emerged squealing into the sunlight. Here were more savannahs, miniature versions of the one outside, except enclosed by prickly hills. All of this, Bradford told me, was Makushi territory, for hundreds of miles around.

  It hadn’t always looked so well defended. Until the 1790s, the grasslands of the northern Rupununi were regularly raided by Caribs and bandeirantes, or slavers from Brazil. It was like a park for hunting humans. There’s even a description of a raid in 1838, which reads like a leisurely duck shoot.

  ‘Thousands of our people were lost,’ said Bradford, ‘but then we learned to fight, and we chopped them, and killed them, and now this land is ours.’

  ‘And how many Makushi are there?’ I asked.

  Bradford sucked his teeth and whistled. Counting Makushi was like counting the ripples on a pond. Sometimes there were a lot, sometimes there were none. In his grandfather’s day it was measles that almost wiped them out. Then, in 1943, a wild strain of malaria got in among them, leaving only 1,600 survivors. As for the number now, Bradford could only guess. ‘Maybe 13,000. Half here, and the rest in Venezuela and Brazil.’

  His own family were, however, like a subset of the tribe. They hadn’t all been Makushis. Peering upwards into his family tree, Bradford could see mostly Caribs and Arawaks, but also a Scotsman perched in the branches. It was the irrepressible Mr Allicock, a strapping Victorian farmer. At some low point in the Makushis’ evolution his potent genes had got mingled in, and now there were Allicock chiefs all over the savannah.

  ‘Like this place,’ said Bradford, ‘which was run by my Uncle Fred.’

  We’d arrived in Surama, where I was to stay. It was a memorable arrival, if only because I hardly noticed it at all. All I could see was grass. Although Surama was the size of central Paris and took an hour and a hal
f to cross, only 240 people lived there. Even they were hardly ostentatious. Most of them lived around the edge of the savannah, in houses the colour of straw. Their great grandparents, according to Bradford, had settled here to service the cattle trail. But now the trail had long since gone, leaving the village with nothing but a few iron way-markers and an appetising name: Surama, ‘The Place of Roasted Meat’.

  There were few other signs of life: a little church, a school without any walls, a shop that sold bows and arrows, and a weather station. This last unnecessary gizmo had lasted only three months before the spirits had tired of it and blown it to bits with lightning. The church, it seems, had fared better, with only a plague of termites. Perhaps this was because (as one old Rupununian put it) ‘The Makushis worship mostly the Anglican god – as well as lots of others.’

  As we passed each leafy household, Bradford called out the names. Everyone seemed to be an Allicock. They lived in concentric rings: Uncle Fred surrounded by his sons, who were in turn surrounded by theirs, all half a mile apart. It was like a galaxy of Allicocks, all radiating power from Uncle Fred. In time I’d get to meet most of them: Ovid the guide; Sidney, who saw the future, richly cluttered with tourists; Velda, who distrusted the sea, and dreamed of a digital camera; Veronica, whose gold teeth were decorated with hearts and stars to ward off evil; and poor Sidney Junior, who’d gone to Georgetown once, discovered traffic, clashed with an old car and never walked again. Then, finally, there was Dango, the man with whom I was about to stay.