Wild Coast Read online

  ‘Louis had eleven sons,’ whispered Esther. ‘All a bit wild.’

  Behind us, something stirred in the shadows.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ said Esther.

  The man said nothing. He had lank, blue hair and lifeless eyes.

  ‘We’d better go,’ murmured Esther, ‘this isn’t good.’

  ‘Who was that?’ I asked, as we hurried away.

  ‘Well, he calls himself Satan. He’s a rustler, probably the most wanted man on the savannahs. I always feel nervous with people like that around. You never know if they’ve got guns. I think he’s one of Louis’s lot. He stole one of my horses once, called Skelly. I only got it back when I threatened to kill him.’

  ‘Should we go to the police?’

  ‘No point. By now he’ll be back in the Moco-Moco forest.’

  We drove away over the airstrip. Although I knew I shouldn’t, I felt slightly exhilarated by the encounter with Satan. It was as though I’d stumbled on the Melville gene in its most mutated form: predatory, arboreal and well beyond the law. Forty years earlier the same gene, or an earlier variant, had shaped the great revolt. There’d been a Melville at its beginning, and there was another – right here – at its end. He was only eighteen, but the Melville who stood here in 1969, had been armed with a powerful machine gun. He stepped onto the airstrip, took a wild swing at the sky and began loosing off the rounds.

  Above him was a plane full of soldiers, coming in to land.

  As coincidence would have it, the officer in charge of the soldiers was Joe Singh, the same man who was at Jonestown ten years later. He told me that the plane was an old Dakota, with all the seats removed.

  ‘And we were each loaded up with bandoliers and grenades. We came to Manari because it was the only airstrip the rebels hadn’t blocked. I was up in the cockpit, and I suddenly heard “Tap! Tap! Tap!” They were firing at us! If they’d hit the fuel tank, we’d have had it … I told the pilot to go higher. Go above it! We then circled with the gun firing at us, and landed at the far end. As the rebels were in a depression, they were in dead ground and couldn’t fire at us, and so they took to their Mini Mokes, and fled …’

  ‘And what happened to them?’ I asked.

  ‘A few got away. The Venezuelans came to pick them up.’

  ‘And then you marched on Lethem?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the general, ‘without any trouble.’

  Ahead of his soldiers, the population had fled. The Amerindians, believing they were about to be eaten by black soldiers, headed for the hills. The rest waded over the Takutu and took refuge in Brazil. Among them were the Melvilles, and all of Esther’s family. None of them ever went back, she said, and they lost everything. Eventually, Caracas – which still regarded them as Venezuelan – offered them a home. Esther’s father ran a café for the rest of his life, and the Melvilles were last heard of working on the roads. Even now, Melvilles in the Rupununi are the subject of suspicion.

  Meanwhile, the army began the search for remaining rebels.

  ‘It was a straightforward mopping-up operation,’ said Joe.

  But not everyone agreed. There were still some who said that the army brutalised the Rupununi, that they killed a hundred Makushis, that they dumped them in mass graves, that they beat over four hundred people and raped eighty girls (even tethering one down and using a truck to crush her).

  In these versions there were ‘bodies in the river’, but none to be found.

  ‘It’s all rubbish,’ said Joe, ‘I kept a very tight ship.’

  ‘And the stories of genocide?’

  They were all, he said, ‘the product of a feeble mind.’

  ‘So what do you say to people who tell these stories?’

  ‘I’ve said I’ll take them on a tour of the Rupununi. Let them find a single witness! There aren’t any. It just didn’t happen. Besides, I have great affection for the Amerindians. They’ve always been my eyes and ears.’

  It was hard to be sure exactly where the truth lay. I liked Joe, and during my travels the charges of genocide never bore fruit. Of all the Amerindians I met, only a few mentioned beatings or the mistreatment of girls. In Surama there was a man who said he’d been chained up for a week on a concrete floor. But the suspects were soon released. By 1970 only ten accused remained, and they were all acquitted and left for Venezuela. Somehow none of this added up to an iron-fisted campaign – but nor was it kid-gloved either.

  I asked the general why the missionaries were expelled.

  ‘Well, we felt they were involved.’

  ‘And what about the eight ranches left by the rebels?’

  A jubilant president had referred to them as ‘terrorist centres’.

  ‘Yes, it’s true,’ said Joe, ‘we burned them down.’

  During my last week in the Rupununi I travelled out to the great ranch at Pirara, to see what was left. Evelyn Waugh had said that, in 1933, it was ‘one of the most imposing and important houses in the district’. He described a schoolroom, fruit trees and a compendious library with books on every conceivable subject ‘much ravaged by ants’. I paid it a visit with my friend Mr Li.

  ‘I used to come here as a child,’ he said as we reached the drive.

  Ahead of us was a mountainous billowing of mango trees, topped with a wind pump. Beyond it we could just make out a river – the Pirara – like a long, thin lake, curling away through the hummocks of grass. Mr Li said he’d camped here in 1963 and had almost lost a finger, fishing for perai.

  ‘The ranch was owned by the Harts,’ he recalled, ‘a rough-and-tumble lot.’

  I asked what he meant.

  ‘Like something from a Louis L’Amour. Fantasists.’

  Everyone had stories about the Harts. They were descended from a giant American who’d arrived in 1911, after a spell digging railways in Brazil. Ben Hart had weighed over 200 lb, and the sight of so much space was clearly to his liking. He settled and married another of Harry Melville’s daughters, Amy. Waugh remembered him as ‘a kindly middle-aged American of wide experience’ and piety. But it was a curious type of piety. By night Ben led moonlit processions through the grounds, accompanied by his six wild sons, their governess and their Wapisiana grandmother. By day the boys were ‘tumultuous’ and spent their school hours reciting the rosary and getting whipped. But Waugh was clearly taken by their governess, a Creole who wore shorts. She was, he wrote (with uncharacteristic fervour), ‘as lithe and vital as an adolescent Josephine Baker’. Even she, however, managed to exercise only a ‘precarious care’.

  ‘No wonder the boys were so wild,’ said Mr Li.

  We were now almost at the mango trees, churning through the sand.

  Waugh’s tumultuous urchins had, it seemed, turned into natural rebels. ‘They used to hold rodeos here,’ said Mr Li, ‘and parachute jumps. I think two of the boys had been in the US army, and had served in Korea. But all of them were always fighting! I think most were involved in the uprising …’

  Beneath the mango trees, all trace of the old ranch had gone.

  Mr Li stopped and stared. ‘I still find this hard to believe …’

  In front of us an imposing mansion had vanished, along with its schoolroom and its compendious library of half-eaten books. The army had burned and destroyed everything, even the corrals and the fences. The Harts had fled, every single one. President Burnham had regarded their Pirara as ‘the centre of the operation’, and this was his terrible revenge. Now all that remained were a few shoddy brick structures erected in the 1980s, and abandoned ten years later.

  From one of them an Indian emerged, grinning and waving. ‘Me truck broken down on the road,’ he said, ‘I been here two days now!’

  He said that, although he was surprised by the fruit, he’d not felt easy here.

  ‘Something not right,’ he beamed, ‘too many ghosts.’

  A few days later I left the Rupununi and flew back to the centre of Guyana, and the beginning of the forest.

  Down below, the
colours of the grass and bog seemed to melt and implode, simultaneously livid and inert. The optimist in me announced that this would probably always be one of the most magnificent, untrampled corners of our planet. Isolation was a beautiful price to pay for all its crimes: for the obstinacy of its environment, for failing to produce a golden city, for daring to rebel, and, of course, for being a republic that lasted a day. Isolation had even become government policy after the revolt. For years it was illegal for anyone living in the region to keep an aircraft overnight, and they had to have the word ‘RUPUNUNI’ stamped in their passport, like the mark of Cain.

  Even now, the coastlanders could hardly bear to contemplate the savannahs at their back. Perhaps for people who saw themselves as Caribbean it was all just too South American. Nobody ever went there, and even the idea of a road made them bristle with disgust. As for the plan to fly out frozen cows, that too had been dropped. Now the only planes that ever ventured in and out of the Rupununi were like mine, carriers of the quick and not the dead. Even then, only three out of twenty seats were taken.

  Behind me was a travelling oncologist, out from New York. ‘I love the Rupununi,’ she said, ‘but I’m always pleased to see that forest.’

  I must have looked surprised. ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cos that’s when I know we’re soon back in the present.’

  4

  A PARLIAMENT OF ANTS

  There is no country which yieldeth more pleasure to the Inhabitants, either for these common delights of hunting, hawking, fishing fowling and the rest, than Guiana does.

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

  Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana

  The people come out to Demerara and they drink and they drink, and they die, and then they write home and they tell their friends that the climate killed them.

  James Rodway, Guiana

  Demerara is the Elysium of the tropics … the Happy valley of Rasselas, the one true and actual Utopia of the Caribbean Seas, the Transatlantic Eden.

  Anthony Trollope, The West Indies and the Spanish Main

  AT THAT MOMENT THE FORESTS of central Guyana didn’t feel like the beginning of the present. Even at the best of times, I’ve only been grateful for woodland, never really fond of it. Now here I was the wrong side of one of the oldest, thickest, darkest, dampest and least-inhabited forests in the world. Seventy per cent of it has never been possessed and only barely explored. From the air it had looked like a sort of compacted vegetable fog. Nothing about it had conveyed the present. Now all I could see ahead was some vast prehistoric frontier and a long, last plunge through our primeval past.

  On my map there was no real certainty as to where – or whether – this forest would end. Not only was everything green but an over-imaginative mapmaker had also added a few touches of his own. He’d shifted towns around, obliterated Colin Edwards’s road, reinserted the cattle trail and then added a trans-jungle highway and an enormous American airbase. As a map, it was more aspirational than useful, but at least the coast was there, and two great sinuses, the Demerara and the Essequibo. Between them – several hundred miles to the north – I could also make out a spattering of old place-names: Uitvlugt, Enterprise, Harlem. This, I realised, was the heart of old Guiana, and it was here that I was heading.

  I lost count of the hours I spent bouncing down tracks that led to the coast. Being completely encased in foliage, it was like travelling down a pipe that arched and bowed, and occasionally flexed to the left and right. Sometimes I could see almost a mile ahead, as though Colin’s men had created this road by blasting it out with some earth-hugging rocket. At other times I could hardly see anything at all, just a silvery gash in the canopy above. The rhythm of it all, and the endless stream of greenery, was inspiring in its way. On either side of me the flanks of the forest were as formidable and dense as city walls, and in the larger trees – the mora and the silk cotton – I began to see great, grey buttresses like the limbs of a cathedral. I tried to imagine how it would be to walk this track and to feel the same landscape endlessly repeat itself, tree after tree, for weeks on end. After a while you’d begin to wonder whether it was you that was moving or just the orange soil, flowing south beneath your feet.

  My eyes were soon craving incident, or some sort of visual punctuation. For hours there’d be nothing, and then a feast of occurrences. I always noted them. It might be a toucan, a log the size of a truck or a mysterious cluster of hammocks. Once there was a real treat: a policeman in silver buttons, sitting in a hut plastered with posters of wanted villains. Another time we passed an overturned truck, with its driver and crew camped underneath. They all looked so happy and domesticated that I wondered whether – one day – their unfortunate accident would turn into a village.

  There was only one stop, a small collection of painted huts, called ‘Kilometre 58’. I liked the idea of a place that had defined itself purely in terms of somewhere else. In fact, everything about it was faintly apologetic. ‘We used to have horses,’ said a man on a bicycle, ‘but the jaguars ate them.’

  Km 58 did, however, have the only eatery in central Guyana.

  ‘What’s for lunch?’ I asked.

  ‘Wild cow,’ said an Amerindian, crouched among the pots.

  I bought two boxes of stew and gave one to my driver.

  ‘Tapir!’ he said gratefully, tipping his head back and pouring it all in. I did the same. It was like a rich boeuf bourguignon on a salver of cardboard.

  I had several different drivers on my journey north. The last one was so Indian and so strongly accented that I began to wonder whether I’d ended up on the wrong continent. But for the first part of the journey I got a lift with a man called Stephano, whose father was Brazilian and part of the gang that built the road.

  ‘This were meant to be Brazil’s gateway to the Caribbean …’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘it doesn’t look like it now.’

  ‘No, they all finds a quicker way, up through Venezuela!’

  I enjoyed Stephano’s distorted outlook and his jungly chatter. He said that, when he wasn’t driving, he was cutting trees, and had girls all over the forest. There were over a thousand different types of tree, as well as creepers, epiphytes, blood-sucking loranths and strangler figs. They all had their uses, he said. Did I know that purple heart was poisonous to termites? Or that aromata was used for ringworm, and greenheart for ships? Or that the best cure for scorpion bites was a little blob of earwax? If you ever saw a mango tree, that’s where the cattle trail used to pass. And under every silk cotton was a grave of murdered slaves.

  I’d like to have travelled all the way with Stephano, but then – suddenly – the forest ended, and a huge expanse of mad, thrashing water appeared. We’d arrived at Kurupakari, the place where the old cattle trail had crossed the Essequibo River. It was here that I’d decided to break my journey for a few nights. So, while Stephano headed back to his girls and his trees, I made my way down to the field station on the banks of the river. It rejoiced in the name ‘Monster Worm’ but is better known as Iwokrama.

  I shall remember Iwokrama as one last moment of gentility before plunging back into the forest.

  It was an arresting scene: grassy banks, acres of buttery sunlight and the pleasing rumble of water. I was sure this was the place that Waterton had in mind when he wrote: ‘This delightful scenery of the Essequibo made the soul overflow with joy and caused you to rove in fancy through fairyland.’

  While I was never quite moved to fairy-like roving, I knew what he meant. Sitting here, watching the river turn purple and fireflies sifting through the trees, it was impossible not to feel a certain surplus of joy. In fact, Mankind has probably been here, quietly overflowing, for almost 6,000 years. Down among the waterfalls were the comments of some of Iwokrama’s earliest visitors, gouged in the rock. I’m no reader of runes and glyphs, but I’m sure I could make out ‘nice water’, ‘good fish’, ‘occasional famines’, ‘straight sticks’ and plenty of fat things with
little short legs.

  Nowadays the visitors tend to be less expressive but far more numerous. Almost everyone who comes to Guyana gets here at some stage or other. And why not? Its wooden cabins, arranged in an arc along the bank, felt like the ringside seats at an extraordinary spectacle. First to call by were a pair of macaws in a state of perpetual carnival. Then came a bright pink snake, thousands of moths, a friendly old caiman and a sloth, which – in torchlight – looked like a teddy-bear mounted with meat-hooks. But what was even more remarkable was that this great, savage menagerie extends backwards over an area the size of Rhode Island or Essex. As reserves go, this may not be vast, but it’s completely unmolested. This is one of the few places on Earth where Man – apart from the odd petroglyph – has barely made a mark.

  Because the field station had tiptoed so lightly into this forest, we often saw no one at all. Food would appear and beds would be made, but none of it seemed to involve clatter or dialogue or even people. But then, at around dusk or dawn, I’d be aware of someone standing at my shoulder. It would be one of the Makushis from the village, here as a guide.

  Most of the time I went off with a young hunter called Edgar. At first, it was disconcerting to turn and find his face so close, peering into mine. Most of his teeth were broken into little points, and on one side they were missing altogether, which gave him a leer like a wolf. But he was a thoughtful man and knew the forest like his larder. During our walks he was always finding me teas and greens and edible grubs. He was also an energetic pharmacist, advising on cures for everything from BO (tonka beans) to whooping cough (an infusion of ground-up baboon ants). There was nothing Edgar wouldn’t treat, and I was always testing him, thinking up fresh disasters.

  ‘What happens if you crack your skull? Or break a leg?’

  ‘Easy. Kill an anaconda, smear on the fats and tie it up with leaves.’