Jerry and I both froze and gazed at it wordlessly.  We were no more than ten feet apart.  I guess we both held our breath while the snake flowed smoothly over the branch–I’ll swear its head had vanished into the vegetation on one side before its tail came out the other–and we didn’t breathe again until its tail had vanished.
     “Jesus Christ,” Jerry said.

     Finally we reached what we thought was the summit.
     We had hoped, like all mountaineers, that the clouds would part at that moment, revealing vast expanses of trackless green beneath us.  That didn’t happen.  We declared victory anyway.  All five of us solemnly wrote our names on a piece of paper, added the date, put the paper in a can and buried it under a cairn of stones.

     Eleven years later I was at another party.  The party had been thrown to acclaim the return of the Real Conquerors of Ayenganna.  Because of course it was politically incorrect for the Highest Mountain in Guyana to be Conquered by a team in which native sons were outnumbered four to one (Amerindians, scornfully termed “bucks” by the coastal dwellers, didn’t count, of course).
     “We were first,” I told one of the Conquerors.  “Didn’t you know about us?”
     “Oh, sure.  But you never got to the real summit.”
     “Huh?’
     “The summit ridge, yeah.  But not the real summit.”
     “Did you find our can?”
     “We did.”
     “What did you do with it?”
     “Oh.  We brought it down with us.”
     “You did, huh?”
     What else was there to say?  He may have been right.

 
     It poured all the way down.  Our camp was flooded.  But Martin, one of the droghers, had managed to keep my hammock and blanket dry.
     I swore I would send him a present when I got back to Barbados.  I forget what; not money, something that would have been useful to him.  But a lot of time passed and a lot of things happened before I got back.  And...well, you know how these things are.  I just never got around to it.
     I regret that, to this day.

 
     We returned by a different route.  Through some of the most beautiful country I’ve seen anywhere.  One place I remember was like a huge natural rock garden, with rivulets trickling over rock shelves, and mosses of every shade of green, and mountains all around–no human landscaper could have produced anything so lovely.
     I think I have never felt stronger, fitter, freer than on that walk.  I had gotten my second wind, worn off all the aches and strains of the first few days.  And I felt a total oneness with the landscape, so much so that I actually dared to go on ahead of the lead drogher, following a barely visible trail that I had never seen before, without a map, with nothing but my eyes and my feel for terrain to tell me which way to go.
     It was a foolhardy thing to do.  But if I have a single trait in which I excel others, it’s my sense of location.  It’s like I have a GPS in my head.  The only time things go wrong is when I listen to other people, like in Sicily when Yvonne and I were misdirected by a nun, and we found ourselves, at dusk, atop a sheer five-hundred-foot drop-off above Trapani.  And sure enough, this time they all finally caught up with me and I hadn’t put a foot wrong all day.  I’m prouder of that than almost anything I’ve done since.

      The next day we came to an Amerindian village.  It looked pristine– palm-thatched huts in a bamboo stockade, folk in traditional jockstraps–but there was one solitary piece of the modern world: a transistor radio.
     The inhabitants offered us cassava  beer and banana wine.    
     Cassava is the basic Amerindian crop.  The species that grows in Guyana is, in fact, poisonous.  What you do, you chop it up and put it into a kind of press known as a matapi.  This consists of a wicker tube a foot or so in diameter and maybe ten or twelve feet long.  You suspend it vertically from a long pole.  At the bottom of the matapi is a woven loop.  A woman (always a woman–the men are mighty hunters, the women do all the shitwork) lies on her back, puts her ankle through the loop and cranks her leg up and down, up and down, for hours if need be.  This expels the poisonous juices.  You can then take some of what’s left and ferment it to make beer.  The rest you pound into flour and bake, resulting in “loaves” as big as a cartwheel but no thicker than your finger that are rock-hard and brittle and taste of nothing at all.      The beer, quite frankly, tasted revolting.  I suppose you could get a buzz from it, but I could never gag down enough.  The banana wine was a killer.  Jerry was really sick from it, and he claimed, years afterwards, that his stomach had never wholly recovered.

      Another river, another tent-boat.  The water was lower now as the dry season progressed.  The trunks of fallen trees almost reached the surface.  Every twenty minutes or so the Archimedes engine spat another broken shear-pin.  Luckily we had a box of spares.  Even so we only just made it back to Kamerang before darkness fell.

     The District Commissioner, whose headquarters were at Kamerang, had gone walkabout somewhere in his vast bailiwick, so Bleakley took possession of his house by some kind of eminent domain. The next thing befitting the First Conquerors of an Untamed Peak in the last days of the Colonial Empire was to get royally drunk.  Problem was, the couple of bottles we’d taken on the trip had gone within two days, and no more was to be had in Kamerang’s only store.
     “No problem,” Bleakley said. “Can you give me a hand?”
     I followed him out to the District Commissioner’s garage, where the District Commissioner’s jeep was parked.  With the speed and deftness of a pro car thief, Bleakley hot-wired it.  We shot down the runway into a narrow, twisting tunnel under the trees.  Bleakly drove at breakneck speed, regardless of the ruts, for about three miles. There we got out and unearthed, from a pile of palm fronds, a crate of Scotch that he had hidden there for just such an occasion.  We drove back at the same pace..