Wild Coast Page 14

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I said, ‘why is this a lake?’

  ‘Because it is,’ smiled Mr Li, ‘at certain times of year.’

  He explained that we were standing at a watershed. From here the water ran off to join the tributaries of Essequibo in one direction and the Amazon in the other. During the wet season these two mighty river basins were linked by floodwaters, and the eastern Guianas became – if not exactly an island – completely encircled by water. The first person to recognise this phenomenon was the great explorer and hydrographer Alexander von Humboldt, in 1800. He also recognised that, in the absence of any other lakes of maritime size, the flood plain had to be ‘Lake Parima’.

  ‘And that,’ said Mr Li, ‘is right where we’re standing now.’

  So Captain Keymis was right after all, although he’d never known it. In 1616 he and Raleigh set off on one last search for the city of Manoa. Unwisely, they took the landward route, via the Orinoco, and were soon tangling with the Spanish. As the expedition disintegrated into a bloody brawl, it was obvious that a twenty-year quest had come to an end. Keymis took himself off to his state-room and blew a hole in his chest. When this failed to deliver the certainty he sought, he placed the tip of a dagger under his breastbone and drove it upwards into his heart. Raleigh, too, would soon be dead. On 29 October 1618 he was brought before an audience in the Old Palace Yard, Westminster. Among the onlookers were a group of ‘Guianians’, brought back as samples. To them, the ways of their much-bejewelled captors were never more mysterious than now. After a flurry of feathers and taffeta, Raleigh made a great speech and then knelt before an axeman and was trimmed of his head. With that swipe came to an end English hopes of a gilded city.

  I now stared out across the lake of golden grass.

  ‘This,’ I suggested, ‘would have been a disappointment for Raleigh.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Mr Li.

  ‘Only perhaps?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ he said genially, ‘because there might be something out there.’

  Few other visitors have been so generous. Waugh is typically sniffy about the non-existent lake. Even Waterton becomes uncharacteristically snappish when he gets here and finds nothing but the dust. ‘So much for Lake Parima,’ he writes, ‘and so much for El Dorado.’

  Half an hour south, a peculiarly British El Dorado had briefly resurfaced.

  We were now back on the ridge, swooping around in the gravel. Nothing grew up here, except a light, yellowish stubble and a bush that sprouted claws. Mr Li said that, in the rains, these hills became the headwaters of the Pirara. At that moment it was hard to imagine water at all, on this surface something like Saturn. Then, suddenly, the gravel seemed to swell up and part, and ahead of us appeared a hill like an enormous purple egg. Mr Li swerved off the track and drove up its side.

  ‘Look!’ he said, ‘we’re almost in Brazil!’

  All around us, the savannahs began flattening out, like the features on a map. In any given direction it would have taken days to reach the horizon. But much closer in – only a mile to the west – was a fringe of knotty scrub. That, said Mr Li, was the international border.

  Back in 1838 the proximity of mighty Brazil had caused a ripple of indignation. At its source was a little man with a ‘damnable temper’ and a taste for spiffy uniforms and hats. Brazilians, in his view, were savages and drunkards, their language was profane, and they were slavers by nature, and popish at best. The solution, he said, was the creation of an imperial counter-balance, a British Utopia in the image of Sir Walter. There’d be a new boundary, marked out with stakes. On this side, promised the little imperialist, the Indians would become Her Majesty’s subjects, and enjoy her protection. As a first step, on 24 May – the Queen’s birthday – he clambered up onto the purple egg and planted the Union Jack.

  The odd thing about the man with the flag is that he wasn’t British at all, but a cartographer from Prussia. Robert Schomburgk had somehow ended up in the wrong empire and then made it all his own. No one would get to know British Guiana better. Over a period of eight years he’d hack his way into almost every corner of the colony; he’d conduct at least six astonishing surveys, all in the name of the Crown; he’d discover dozens of new creatures, the source of the Essequibo, the highest mountain in north-east Latin America – called Roraima – and the world’s largest lily (which, naturally, he named Victoria regis); best of all, he’d delineate the boundaries with both Suriname and Venezuela, much to Britain’s advantage. With so much credit to his name, it’s hardly surprising that London went along with his Brazilian venture and lent him a tiny army.

  The expedition to the purple egg got off to an inauspicious start. Instead of police officers, as he’d requested, Schomburgk was given thirty-five soldiers of the West India Regiment. They were a resentful, work-shy lot, who wore slippers instead of boots and took a month to build their boats. When they finally set off, there was a squabble over titles, and Schomburgk insisted on marching – in an outlandish uniform – right at the head of the column. As they moved upcountry, he left bossy little messages in champagne bottles for those coming up behind. Naturally, the other officers soon had him down as a cad.

  Eventually, in February 1842, this trifling, dandified troop reached the top of the purple egg. The soldiers were horrified. This, wrote one, is ‘the last place God Almighty made’. The Colonial Office, however, was more upbeat. It immediately announced ‘The Liberation of Pirara’ (adding, at a stroke, a curious footnote to its imperial history). Whether the Brazilians were impressed by all this flouncing and flummery is hard to say. They positioned a few troopers along the fringe of knotty scrub, and then the two sides settled down to a long, hot game of savannah chess.

  The castle the British built is still there: a giant doughnut of piled-up gravel.

  ‘Welcome to Fort New Guinea,’ said Mr Li.

  ‘Guinea? Isn’t that in Africa?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mr Li, ‘I don’t think they knew they were still in Guiana.’

  We got out, clambered into the ditch, and then up onto the rampart. It wasn’t much; 166 years of wind and rains had gnawed it down to a lumpy outline. But across the compound the gravel was glittering with glass. It looked like the debris left by some wild, interplanetary party. There was brown glass for ale, and green for champagne. Liberation, I mused, can be full of surprises. For Her Majesty’s newly liberated subjects – the Amerindians – perhaps the greatest surprise was smallpox. By the end of the campaign there were at least three tribes well on their way to extinction.

  Fort New Guinea is a fitting tribute to an old myth. Like all El Dorados, this hollow ring of gravel had yielded neither gold nor perfection. Six months after they arrived, Schomburgk’s troops were ordered home. As they left, they scattered their bottles and set fire to the stockade. They’d achieved precisely nothing. Within days the only sign of their endeavours was the giant purple egg, now topped with a crown of ash.

  At the end of the northern savannahs, Mr Li dropped me in Lethem.

  ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the only town in the Rupununi.’

  It was also the only town in southern Guyana. That meant it served an area the size of Britain, which – to Mr Li – gave it the feel of a bustling city. He described drugs and electricity, reckless development and plenty of drink. Just as I was getting used to the idea of an urban sprawl and the stifling hug of concrete, I realised that we were already in Lethem and had nearly driven through it. Another triumph, I noted, for the Makushi principle of human dispersal. In Lethem a mere 12,000 people had managed to spread themselves out over a plot the size of London.

  ‘Good luck,’ said Mr Li, ‘and be careful.’

  Over the few days I spent in Lethem, I never really discovered what it was that had worried Mr Li. Perhaps it was just the thought of compacted people? Anyway, I never saw any junkies or pimps; most of the time I never saw anyone at all. Maybe it was different during the rodeo. Every Easter, I was told, the population doubled, and the v
aqueros – or cowboys – came to town. For four days they performed heroic feats of drinking before tumbling around on their horses. That, I decided, was probably the time for more urban activities like mugging and whoring and pelting your neighbour with Precambrian rock.

  So I had Lethem mostly to myself. After a while, I began to enjoy this. It was that same feeling that, out here, the savannah was in charge. All the roads were made of dirt, and so were the bits in between. The poor and the Amerindians even had their own mudbrick suburb, called Culvert City. Meanwhile, everyone else was scattered through the sedge. A few still had old, wooden bungalows, now bearing the ravages of Nature’s buckshot. But most people here were new. Their houses had a more temporary, flat-packed feel, as though at any moment they could just fold them up and run screaming for the coast. No one had a garden. If there’d ever been a hint of horticulture, it had long since been churned up, in an orgy of pigs and trucks.

  Eventually I located the centre, or at least a place where buildings clustered. It was here that I found somewhere to stay: a set of solid, concrete lodgings known as the government guesthouse. Just beyond it was the River Takutu, a gloop of orange that kept Brazil at bay. Some people, mostly Amerindians, sat here all day, catching fish for their boily-boily. The water, they said, was only shallow, and never too deep for a stolen horse.

  The border had a powerful effect on downtown Lethem. It meant that, like all good frontier towns, this little cluster could be both wildly exuberant and determinedly prim. Most people seemed to be either missionaries or cowboys. Everywhere there were notices saying ‘No Indecent Language’, and yet people were free with the rum and drove like fighter pilots (often both at once). By day, they enjoyed an internet café, a cow roast and a Brazilian pornographer, but at night it was all shut down, and off went the power. Meanwhile, the supermarket was called Savannah Stores, and was stocked with everything you’d need for a life in the grass: saltfish, cast nets, catapults and grog.

  On my last night I had dinner at the government guesthouse with a splendidly desiccated character. Gordon Forte was an old friend of Diane McTurk and had wandered the Rupununi on and off for sixty years. The experience, it seems, had left him shrunken and sinewy, and desperate to talk. He hardly touched his food, but dipped in and out of his curious life. It was a lovely, fragmented story, full of things half-done and things half-said. There was philosophy, Catholicism, some Chinese grandparents, books (followed by insolvency), travels in half a Land Rover, thoughts on Schomburgk, a semi-detached wife and the remnants of a marriage. Being half-brilliant, Gordon had half-lived dozens of lives, sometimes simultaneously. Over the years, he said, he’d done everything from selling mosquito-proof shirts and recycling torches to transcribing the proceedings of the Guyanese parliament. His latest venture was the pursuit of suffering.

  ‘I’ve moved into the St Ignatius Mission.’

  I remembered the mission: a scattering of painted huts some way out in the Lethem scrub. In the middle was a large, plain building, on which the savannah winds had spent almost a century sharpening their claws. It was obviously a good place to plan a little penance, as Gordon had discovered.

  ‘My wife said I was financially irresponsible, so now I’ve taken a vow of poverty.’

  ‘Just poverty?’

  ‘Yes, I couldn’t stand the idea of obedience …’

  ‘And chastity?’

  ‘I’ll leave that to nature.’

  With that, he went outside and came back with an enormous cardboard box.

  ‘I’m giving everything away, starting with these books.’

  ‘And you want me to take them?’

  ‘Well, you’re going to the southern savannahs, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Off to Dadanawa tomorrow.’

  ‘Good. Then you can give them these. Some of my favourites.’

  ‘What are they?’ I said, expecting Sir Thomas More or perhaps a little Locke.

  Gordon brightened a little and pushed the box towards me. ‘Dick Francis,’ he said, ‘the complete works. I won’t need them any more.’

  So that’s how I ended up, the next day, waiting in the early morning mist with a rucksack, a bow and arrow, and a vast consignment of horsey thrillers.

  My lift turned up, a few hours later than expected, like a wagon train out of the dust.

  Nothing about that day was quite as I’d envisaged.

  A sedate jaunt around the tail of the Kanukus seemed suddenly to transform itself into a full-scale war party led by the Wild Bunch. For a moment I just stood and stared. The cavalcade now grinding to a halt in front of me consisted of two partially mangled pick-ups, half-a-dozen boys with ponytails, a beautiful Amerindian girl in designer combat gear and the warrior queen herself, who was short and wiry, and had reddish hair and bright blue nails. Almost everyone had some sort of knife or sword, and only the commando girl wore shoes: a pair of startling, gold high heels.

  ‘Hi, I’m Sandy de Freitas,’ said the lady with blue nails.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Quite a reception.’

  She beamed, and gave a little shrug.

  ‘Sorry my husband’s not here. He’s up in town with bushy arse.’

  This, it turned out, was not a disease of piracy but a case of leishmaniasis.

  ‘A little sandfly,’ said one of the boys, ‘starts to eat your face.’

  Other aspects of that morning took longer to work out. I discovered that this was the monthly shopping trip for the Dadanawa ranch. The ponytail boys were just willing outriders, with nothing much else to do. They were all half Makushi and half something else (either Welsh or Irish), and always spoke softly with a rich, grassland twang. The swords were for castrating bulls, or trimming off slices of tasso, and the beautiful commando was the ranch cook. As for Sandy, she was born in the sugar fields and had a touch of Portuguese and a healthy blast of Scottish.

  It took a while to get off the ground. First, the trucks had to be stripped down and all their parts laid out on a tarpaulin in the grass. Then it was all put back, along with a sack of salt, some bicycles, a month’s supplies, a few bits of furniture, a box of bullets, six pallets of beer and a case of rum.

  ‘Good to go?’ piped Sandy.

  ‘Good to go!’ replied the voices from deep inside the baggage.

  Then we were off, on a beautiful lurch around the Kanukus. After an hour we rounded the southern tip of the range, which felt like driving through the gateway of a primordial world. Even the road seemed to fail. We were now wobbling along through marsh and sedge, through slicks of brilliant ooze, grass like green fire, liverish pools and succulent bogs rimmed with pink. I remember lilies so purple they looked like the work of an imperial hatter. Then we’d drop down into a long, thready crack of gallery forest, plunge through a stream and then scramble back out, up a bank of black quartz. I secretly hoped that this ride would never end, and it almost didn’t. It would take another four hours to cover fifty miles.

  At some point we passed Shulinab, the last Makushi village.

  ‘We’re now in the southern savannahs,’ said Sandy.

  ‘Wapisiana territory!’ said the ponytails.

  Ahead of us the horizon was pimpled with ancient cones. Everything here looked slightly ancient. Once we spotted a savannah fox skulking through the grass. It was like some prehistoric husky, still millions of years from the human hearth. Even the jabiru storks seemed to belong to a long-lost age. They’d all stand around in their tatty coachman’s livery, stabbing at the frogs and then tossing them back like shots of gin. Mankind, it seemed, had made little impression in this walled-off world. Just occasionally we’d come across a boulder that had been prised apart by roots and inhabited by ghosts. Wapisiana ghosts.

  ‘They’re terrified of dwarfs …’ said the ponytails.

  ‘… and spirits underground …’

  ‘… they’ll die if they see one …’

  ‘… so they put pepper in their eyes …’

  According to anth
ropologists, the Wapisiana have always lived like this, in a state of home-made terror. Shy and unassuming, the southern savannahs have long been their last resort. No one knows where they came from, or why. But, for at least 5,000 years they’ve lived here, deep in this inner sanctum, a fugitive tribe. According to a Dutch report of 1769, they spent their days in the grass, ‘and at night they retired to the inaccessible rocks and caves’. Already they were under pressure, with Jesuits in one direction and slavers in the other. By the time the incursions were over, the Wapisianas were a much-diminished tribe. But at least, in transubstantiation and purgatory, they had new magic to add to their own.

  I asked whether anyone knew how many Wapisianas there were today.

  ‘Five thousand,’ said one of the ponytails.

  ‘Twenty,’ said the other.

  Not that it mattered. We didn’t see anyone all day.

  Then, suddenly, as the sun began to cool, the Rupununi reappeared. It was just as wide as before, but younger, and frothy. I could see that it was desperate to gulp up our trucks, and it nearly did. The only way to get across was on a raft made of petrol drums and sticks. It looked like the work of crows, and for a moment it bobbed around euphorically before spinning into the current. I felt sure we were about to be snatched up and sucked through the Kanukus, and then backwards through Guyana. But then I noticed some Wapisianas, paddling out from the opposite shore. They were glossy and powerful, like little bronze statues that had sprung into life.

  The next thing I knew, we were back on sand, at the bottom of a rise.

  ‘Here we are,’ announced Sandy, ‘the Hill of the Macaw.’

  It was Dadanawa, a tiny empire built by a Scot who thought he’d died.

  Apart from Jesuits and slavers, it took Europeans a while to settle the savannahs.