In case you wondered how I even heard of Guyana...

         


     I was at a cocktail party in Barbados.  I was talking to a man who turned out to be a Swiss doctor, a tourist who just happened to be passing through.
      He said, “I’m going on an expedition to climb the highest mountain in British Guiana.”
      “How interesting ” I said. 
      “How would you like to join us?”
       “Why not?  Sounds like fun.”

     That was almost all that was said before we circulated.  In ten minutes I’d forgotten about it.  Only naive people take such offers seriously.  I certainly never expected to hear of it again, thus no-one was more surprised than me when a few months later, a letter came in the mail, with all the practical detail: times, dates, places, and be sure to bring yachting boots, boots with thick soles and canvas tops so that water can drain out of them, because we’ll be walking through streams a lot of the time and if you wear leather hiking boots the water will stay in them and your feet will rot and drop off.

      What was to become Guyana was then still British Guiana, slated for eventual independence but still with training wheels, so to speak.  It was, and is, an arbitrarily delineated chunk of South America, on the north-east coast between Venezuela and Suriname.  Culturally, it’s as if a large Caribbean island colonized by the Brits had drifted free of its moorings and washed up there.  The coast is a flat, fertile plain most of which lies several feet below sea level, preserved from inundation by dykes built, naturally, by the Dutch who ran the place way back when.  On this plain, roughly two hundred miles long and ten or a dozen miles wide, about ninety-five percent of its million or so inhabitants live.  Most of the land that’s not built on is used for sugar- or rice-growing or subsistence farming.  Inland the terrain, rising gradually through a belt of barren soils to virgin rainforest, tops out along its western frontier in chains of tepuis, as they are known across the Venezuelan border–flat-topped sandstone massifs with vertical sides, anything up to six thousand or, in the case of Roraima, nine thousand feet high.  Southwards, to the Brazilian frontier, stretches mile after mile of low, rolling savanna on which the cattle, cynics say, have to move constantly at a brisk clip to find enough grass to survive.  In this whole interior region, the size of the British Isles, the remaining five percent of the population live.

     Roraima, though higher than anything in Guyana, is not the highest mountain in Guyana.  It stands at the point where the borders of Guyana, Venezuela and Brazil meet.  It was  believed to be the highest mountain east of the Andes until Neblina was found quite recently.  Since their country is so big, and since, as its name suggests, that mountain is continually shrouded in mist, I guess the Brazilians can be excused for overlooking it for so many centuries.

     The highest mountain actually within Guyana is called Ayenganna.  Nobody had ever climbed it, but David Bleakly, head of the Geological Survey of British Guiana, had sworn he would do so before his term of service was over.

     Five of us sat on a bench at the edge of the tarmac in Timehri airport: Bleakley, Jerry Carter, the Swiss doctor, the Young Agronomist, and me.

     Bleakley was a type of Englishmen for whom the Colonial Service might have been created; now that this organization has disappeared, I suspect his kind have disappeared with it.  He was a tall, blond, rangy, taciturn man, from an unimpeachable upper-middle-class background.  Normally I bristled like a junkyard dog when I encountered such.  But the very cream of it, the hundredth percentile, perhaps, forms, like your truly disinterested revolutionary, part of the salt of the earth.   Bleakly was nobody’s fool, though he would never presume on his intelligence, any more than on his breeding, to make others feel inferior.  On top of this, he had an extremely dry wit and–on some occasions if not others--a total disregard for convention.  But what appealed to me most of all was that you knew, after you’d talked to him for five minutes, that if you were in a tight corner and he was watching your back, you had nothing to worry about.  He was not someone I could ever be close to–I suspect he was a man no-one had ever been close to–but I liked, admired and respected him.

     Jerry Carter too was a geologist, Bleakley’s assistant.  He was a Guyanese red man.  By that I don’t mean he was a communist or a Native American (called Amerindians in these parts) but that he was of mixed African and European blood.  In the US, of course, he would have been black, because in the US if you are not white, you are black.  In the Caribbean generally, you are either white, black or red: ask any old black man, and he will explain to you, “Gad mek de white man, an’ Gad mek de black man, but de debbil mek de red man.”  Red men–who of course are brown not red, but a single word covers “red” and “brown” in many African languages–were favored by whites above blacks in the past and in consequence are regarded by many blacks as stuck-up, too big for their boots.  Nobody could say that about Jerry, though. 

     He was the first Guyanese I ever really knew, and I became closer to him than to any of my three white companions.  Some of his virtues he shared with many Guyanese: an amazing openness, a willingness to expose himself modestly yet quite fearlessly to others, and a high level of intelligence (ask anyone at the University of the West Indies who the smartest students are, and they will tell you, the Guyanese).  Others were peculiar to himself: a warm smile, a happy-go-lucky disposition, and a willingness to bear hardship without a word of complaint.

     Of the Swiss doctor and the Young Agronomist, I have little to say.  The Swiss doctor was Swiss, and a doctor, and took himself too seriously, The Young Agronomist was a pink-and-white English boy, like the Yorkshire lad the Cape Coast market women would toss around several years later: he’d been to Ag School, other than that he’d probably never left his native shire until he was posted to this unlikely spot.  The Bush, as the interior wilderness is universally known, is a harsh test of character, one that both of them, in my opinion, failed disastrously in the first couple of days.

      We were sitting on the edge of the airfield waiting for them to finish hosing out our plane.

   Guyana Airways was too young and too small to allow itself the luxury of separate freight and passenger aircraft.  Its handful of DC3s, the old WWII stand-bys that formed the backbone of airlines in all developing countries, did double duty, could be switched from one function to the other in an hour or two.  Our scheduled flight to Kamerang would be on a plane that had just hauled a load of beef from the Rupununi, the southern savanna bordering Brazil.  Because the plane was not refrigerated and the flight took over an hour, the carcases had bled out en route. Now, gushers of pinkish water came pouring out the door, slowing gradually to a trickle, then a diminishing succession of drops.   The plane was left to dry out in the scorching sun.  Eventually, ground crew appeared with folding metal seats and strapped and slotted them into place.  Only then could we board.