Wild Coast Read online

  ‘I was born here,’ she told me, ‘in 1932. A wild child.’

  In some ways not much had changed since Tiny’s day. Karanambu was still a large gravel clearing, planted with mango trees and cashews. Scattered around the edge were the old ox carts and a few antique trucks, put out to grass. The beehive too had survived, with a mop of brand new thatch.

  Inside, it was like a Makushi stately home. The walls were hung with war clubs, bows, combs, quivers, hair-clippers and gun cartridge-fillers. There was even the remains of the goat-chewed library, although the goat had long-since gone. (‘He was accidentally killed,’ said Diane, ‘by a Makushi with a hammer.’) Now there were other animals playing the role of furniture: a three-legged cat, several parakeets, two giant otters, a racoon called Bandit and a colony of fruit bats. All day the thatch creaked and snuffled as though it were a jungle canopy.

  ‘This place was only meant to be temporary,’ said Diane. ‘My parents had always intended to build a really fancy residence, and they even bought the timber. But somehow they never got round to it, and the shingles got used for firewood. So here I am, still living in a benab …’

  Diane was constantly surprised by the curious turns her life hadn’t taken. It was almost as though the timelessness of the Rupununi had got to her, carefully preserving the past. Perhaps that’s why she’d ended up exactly where she’d started. Of course, she was older, but otherwise she was still the sylph who’d dangled upside down in front of the zoologists: willowy, fair, fleetingly fierce and effortlessly charming. Even the years away had hardly made an impression. There’d been a spell at drama school, a little, light skirmish with marriage (‘a disaster’) and then a few glamorous years in Chelsea. All of this had changed nothing except her consonants, which were now beautifully clipped into place.

  ‘And when did you finally come home?’ I asked.

  ‘Crikey,’ she said, ‘I’m not awfully sure. It must’ve been ’77.’

  ‘And the giant otters?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve always had them. I think I’ve reared more than forty.’

  In the distance I could just see one: Pteronura brasiliensis, a ripple of chocolatey fur.

  ‘An orphan,’ said Diane, ‘brought in by Makushis.’

  Once again there were zoologists beating a path to Karanambu. Although during my stay I was the only guest, hundreds of others had been this way. To meet demand, Diane’s Makushis had built four small guest huts, each from thatch and mud. It made a curious hotel. Just as in Tiny’s day, there was no certainty what would happen next. In the few days that I was there, a planeful of food got lost, a fridge exploded, the heavens burst open, and there was a festival of toads. I loved it and would have happily stayed for weeks.

  Karanambu and the otters also cured me of my deep-seated fear of the river. When I saw all the bowmen splashing around in the shallows, together with the giant otters and all our laundry, I decided to plunge in too. It was like swimming in lukewarm tea.

  In the water the otters were half-puppy, half-torpedo. These ones were only young, but one day they’d be as long as a man. When they swam, everything would fold flat – claws, ears and spatula-tail – and they’d slink off, like some fish-seeking missile. On the sandbank, however, they’d look like a series of arches, slightly comical and ungainly. Although, strictly speaking, they were super-sized weasels, the giant otters were originally referred to as ‘water dogs’, and it wasn’t hard to see why. They had huge knobbly paws and thick whiskers, and a bark like a foxhound. Diane said they were always hungry and were always hunting. Their high metabolism made them one of the most voracious predators of all.

  ‘They must eat you out of house and home,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes, each one gets through a bucket of catfish a day.’

  That explained all the bowmen, with their fish-killing arrows.

  ‘So, not much of a pet then?’ I suggested.

  Diane smiled. ‘No, not a pet at all.’

  When the bowmen brought them their piranhas and catfish, the otters snatched the fish in the paws and frantically gobbled them down. Nothing was left, not even fins and teeth. Then the pups would yelp and squeal with rage, lurch down the bank and spiral off into the murk. Occasionally they caught their own fish, corkscrewing through the water, as though wringing it of life. But it didn’t take much to bring the otters back to us. I only had to squeak and they’d be streaming towards me, exploding to the surface. Curiosity like this has always been their downfall. The otters are easy to hunt, and their velvety pelts once made popular collars. Diane said that, even now, they were hunted in Brazil. These days Guyana is one of the few places in South America where these remarkable beasts still thrive.

  During my last swim a baby giant swam up and pressed his face into mine. Along the Rupununi, I don’t suppose farewells get better than this: a flash of murderous teeth, followed by a spine-chilling kiss.

  From Karanambu my plan was to travel west, parallel with the attenuating spine of the Kanukus, and then duck around its coccyx. First, however, I’d have to get a boat to Yurupakari. There the river would veer south through the mountains, while I would carry on along the edge of the range, through a mysterious golden land first described by Sir Walter Raleigh.

  The boat to Yurupakari was owned by a South African.

  ‘It’s abart twinnee-four kilometus,’ he said.

  In all but accent, Ashley Holland made a convincing Guyanese. It was as though he’d just deftly swapped the continents around. Although he was only young, already he had a Makushi family and a bilingual dog and could honk like a jabiru stork or clang like a piping guan. But listening to him talk, as we skimmed along, had a disastrous effect on my internal atlas. I kept thinking we were out on the veldt, and that any minute elephants would come bowling out of the trees. But Ashley had other beasts in mind. Here in the Rupununi he’d discovered a passion for the black caiman. Over the last few years he’d been part of a scientific project that had captured and micro-chipped almost 400 of these armour-plated killers. In scientific terms, this was a herpetological heaven.

  ‘You make them sound quite nice,’ I protested.

  But Ashley wouldn’t hear a word against his gnarly friends.

  ‘You got more chawns of bin kilt by a bus.’

  Yurupakari too, I discovered, was grateful to the alligators. It was built on the top of a grassy hill, a little way back from the river. As Waterton once said of a place like this: ‘The finest park that England boasts falls far short of this delightful scene.’ Yurupakari’s history, however, hadn’t always been so delightful. Between the wars it had become a trading post, dealing in balata. Someone had discovered that this tough, rubbery gum – derived from the letterwood tree – was the perfect coating for submarine cables. Suddenly the world wanted balata, and so Guiana was set to work. This little hill began to boom. Almost all the characters that Waugh had met, scattered through the bush, had ended up here. But no sooner was Yurupakari a thriving centre of the gum trade than it became a soulless slum.

  Even now there was a hint of the old disappointment that had stalked this hill. On the far slopes there were still rich little pockets of rubbish, some of it strangely arresting; pieces of wild animals, helmet-sized tortoiseshells and dozens of Chinese shoes. Once I saw a man with a face like a strawberry and eyes of melting glass. I like to think he’d been on the beer, but it was probably engine fuel. Brazilian álcool could be bought throughout the Rupununi for just a few dollars a quart. It was a miserable leveller of Amerindian life. If ever there was a case of a broken wife, there was always a drinker with broken hands. The lead-free husband is a strange lover. Once he had been the standard model in Yurupakari. But not any more.

  Everything changed, people said, when the scientists arrived.

  Working out exactly who the scientists were was hard, because no one would talk about them. All I could establish was that they’d arrived from New York, studied alligators, criticised the government and then been expelled. Even in mo
dern-day Guyana that was enough to render them officially forgotten. All that had survived was the science of herpetology and an enormous stockade. It was like Fort Apache, straddling the hill. Inside, there was a grand, red library, finished in hardwood, and all day it cheeped with children and computers. It also contained over 20,000 new books and was now radiating literacy across the plains. Perhaps it was power like this that had somehow spooked a distant government.

  With the New Yorkers gone, Caiman House – as it was called – was now renting out its rooms. I slept in a turret above the gate. It was all decorated with polished panelling, four-poster beds, Amerindian tapestries and handsome reptile skulls. I don’t know what you call this style. Makushi chic? Whatever it was, this had to be a first: an alligator-lover’s boutique hotel.

  That night Ashley took me down to the river to try and catch a caiman.

  ‘I’ll be in the first boat, trying to get a noose arand his nick …’

  Meanwhile I sat in the second boat, with the B-team of alligator catchers. At first we couldn’t see anything in the torchlight except a blizzard of moths and giant orange wasps. But then, suddenly, the first boat seemed to bob around in boiling water before plunging across the river in a magnificent squall of spume. It didn’t last; soon the caiman had expended its explosive burst of energy and was hauled up onto a sandbank. There it just lay doggo: ten ugly feet of cedar-bark armour and bulldozer claws. Perhaps this was respect for those it thought were about to eat it? Whatever it was, this was not an easy creature to admire. All about it there was an air of menace, and the delicate scent of carcass. I was relieved when – the micro-chipping done – it was untied and pointed at the water. For a moment it looked stunned at the prospect of its own survival. Then it tensed itself, like the sinews of a catapult, before blasting off into the darkness.

  The Makushis watched as the bubbles dispersed.

  ‘The perfick killa,’ said Ashley, ‘We doan even know if it fills any pain.’

  From the village of the alligator lovers, it’s only three miles to the lost city of El Dorado.

  As to how such a grand and conspicuous city ended up here, adrift in the straw, it is a long story. Most people like to think it begins with an explosion deep in Venezuela and ends in London with a severed head.

  The explosion is the responsibility of Captain Juan Martínez de Albujar, who is the munitions master on an expedition up the Orinoco in 1570. Martínez is a hapless lout, and during one of his moments of haplessness his cargo ignites and a precious barge is blown to bits. As a punishment, Martínez is bound hand and foot and set adrift in a canoe. He floats around for days and is on the brink of death when he’s discovered by some Amerindians. Curious at the sight of what appears to be a man – although repulsively white – they salvage Martínez. He then disappears for the next sixteen years, only to re-emerge in Trinidad in 1586. Although he’s probably spent most of this time shacked up with an Amerindian, he has a gourd of golden beads and a curious tale to tell.

  He says that the Indians who rescued him were Manoans, from the city of The Gilded Man. Everyone knows about El Dorado. He’s the great king who lives on a lake and has his subjects cover him with powdered gold. For years people have been looking for his city. Now here at last is a man who’s been there! Martínez says his new friends took him, blindfolded, on a fourteen-day walk to their golden city. The place was so vast that it took a day to walk across it, and everything he touched was made of gold. For seven months, he says, he stayed there, before helping himself to a baggage train laden with golden pebbles. This would have made him the richest man in the world, if only he hadn’t been robbed. Now all he has is this little calabash and a few remaining nuggets.

  Despite the silliness of this tale, it has a powerful effect. Years later Voltaire will mock it, and the general foolishness of mankind. (In Candide his reconstituted Martínez leaves Manoa at the head of a train of bright red sheep.) But, for now, the tale of the wandering captain is believed. This is mainly due to the reports coming back from another adventurer, Antonio de Berrio. He’s a slightly less bombastic figure than Martínez, and has been scrabbling around in the rainforests (of what’s now Venezuela) for much of the 1580s. At some stage he’s been told of a distant tribe that had ‘come from the west’ and had ‘lived in splendour at a city on a lake surrounded by high mountains’. Doesn’t this confirm what Martínez says? Although it’s not much to go on, the development earns de Berrio the deliciously curly title of Gobernador de la Provincia del Dorado.

  But de Berrio’s career then receives a blow from an unexpected quarter. At the age of sixty-five he plans one final, determined expedition in search of Manoa. Unfortunately, however, in 1595 he’s captured off Trinidad, by a dangerous romantic. It’s Sir Walter Raleigh, who’s also on the hunt for El Dorado. He’s read all there is to read on the subject, including Martínez’s account, and now assumes de Berrio’s role. He and his men then travel 400 miles inland, in open boats, struggling with heat, rain and a bowel-stopping diet of endless dressed meat. Raleigh even loses one of his best negroes (‘a very proper young fellow’) to a legarto, or caiman. Manoa, however, cruelly eludes him.

  In fact, his venture is a total failure in all but the literary sense. He doesn’t conquer a single inch of anything and returns without a speck of gold. But Sir Walter is nothing if not a master of words. In a book that compacts gossip, aspiration, theories, a few first-hand accounts and more than a little deceit he recasts the entire fiasco as a triumphant reconnaissance. Investors are encouraged to believe in diamond mountains, a population of servants and roads that are dressed in gold. Even the title tends to suggest that a great scheme is already in place, and that all it needs is finance: The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, with a Relation to the Great and Golden Citie of Manoa (which the Spanyards call El Dorado). Unsurprisingly, there are few takers, although the book itself is a runaway success. It’s enjoyed as a rollicking yarn and is reprinted several times, in English, Dutch and German.

  Raleigh is disappointed by the ridicule of his peers. They are, he says, ‘blockishe and slothful dullards’. To prove them wrong, he sends out another expedition in 1596, led by an Oxford mathematician called Lawrence Keymis. At this point Raleigh still thinks of ‘Guiana’ as an inland territory, with ‘but one entrance to the sea’. His new expedition, instead of battling up the Orinoco, will approach it from the seaward side. In this, Keymis is partly successful. He sails up the coast of the Guianas, identifying fifty-two rivers, of which forty have never been seen before. He deduces that several of these lead to the lost city, but that the best bet is the Essequibo. The Amerindians tell him the journey takes twenty days by canoe, followed by another day on foot. Then, reports Captain Keymis, ‘afterwards they return to their canoes, and bear them likewise to the side of a lake, which the [Amerindians] call Roponowini, the Charibes Parime, which is of such bigness that they know no difference between it and the main sea.’

  It’s here, on Lake Parima, says Keymis, that Manoa can be found.

  ‘Is that really true?’ I asked Mr Li.

  We were standing in the local school, where Mr Li was the headmaster.

  ‘See for yourself,’ he said, ‘I’m heading that way tomorrow.’

  ‘Any chance of a lift?’

  ‘Sure, I’m off north, to the end of the savannahs.’

  ‘Great,’ I said, ‘me too.’

  ‘OK. And we’ll stop at the place Keymis describes.’

  Mr Li was the perfect companion for such an unpromising venture. He was whiskery, slightly stiff, spectacled and sceptical. Among his ancestors he could count Amerindians, Chinese, Africans and Portuguese traders. Between them, they’d left him with the powerful impression that man was an instinctive wanderer, that he never quite knew what he was looking for and was invariably lost. I wondered if that’s why he liked the idea of Manoa, a capital city for the chronically displaced. For him, Captain Keymis, the sailor–mathematician, was the hero of th
e El Dorado story. While everyone else was chasing fantasies, he was a scholar off in pursuit of geographical truth.

  ‘And he was seldom wrong,’ said Mr Li, ‘although it cost him his life.’

  We were now driving along a hot, crumbling ridge that led south from Yurupakari. The grass here was shiny and yellowish, like a haze of burnished metal. In places – where the Makushis were clearing snakes – it was on fire, and the long brittle stalks would explode in the heat. Everywhere the anthills watched. They no longer looked like monks but a great muddy army, crouched in the straw, eight feet tall and as hard as bullets. Beyond them, in among the undulations, were ‘bush islands’, tufts of straggly forest, erupting wherever there was moisture. Out in the grass, however, few trees survived: just the sun-crazed Caiambés, whose foliage was smiley green and sandstone rough, and the Parikaran trees, which looked like cracks that had come to life.

  Suddenly, the ridge ended and the ground fell away.

  ‘This is it,’ said Mr Li, ‘this is Lake Parima.’

  Below us, stretching away as far as the eye could see, was a plain of billowing gold. It wasn’t quite as Keymis had envisaged it, with ‘infinite numbers of canoes’. There weren’t even any anthills to mar the horizontality – or bush islands, or farms, or slits of cleansing fire. It was just a beautiful shimmering flatness. I wondered what Raleigh’s men would have made of it. He often talked of a form of madness called calenture. It afflicted sailors, who after months at sea would begin to see it as land and jump from their ships. Here they’d have suffered the opposite and found themselves swimming through the stalks or drinking the dust.