by Evelyn Waugh
Sure enough about twenty yards ahead was a very large snake, curled up in the middle of the trail.
‘What kind is it?’
‘I never saw anything like him before. Look at his terrible great head,’ hissed Mr Bain.
It certainly was a very odd-looking head from where we sat, swollen and brown and quite different in appearance from the mottled coils. Mr Bain dismounted and I followed. Very stealthily, step by step he approached the creature. It did not move and so, emboldened, he began to throw pieces of dead wood at it. None of them fell within six feet of their mark. He approached closer, motioning me back apprehensively. Then the snake suddenly raised his neck, retched and for a moment it appeared as though his head had fallen off. Then it became clear what had happened. We had surprised a python in the act of slowly swallowing a large toad. It had got down the back legs and was slowly sucking in the body when it had been disturbed; the ‘terrible great head’ was the toad’s body half in and half out of the jaws. The python averted its own delicately pointed face and slipped away into the bush; the toad showed little gratitude or surprise at his escape, but dragged himself rather laboriously under a log and sat down to consider his experience.
Always, but particularly from sunset until dawn, the bush was alive with sounds. We used to turn in early, usually between seven and eight, because there was nothing to do after dark; there were no chairs to sit in or table to sit at; the lantern light was too dim for reading. As soon as we finished supper we rolled up in our hammocks and there was nothing to do but lie and listen for ten or eleven hours. There were the immediate sounds of poor Mr Bain’s asthma; of the boys squatting round their fire, sometimes singing, more often arguing, always quite unintelligible when they were among themselves; there were our own beasts grazing in the corral and limping about at hobble; often we would hear the crash of dead timber falling in the forest near us, but around and above and through all these were the sounds of the bush. I am no naturalist; Mr Bain’s experienced ear was able to pick out innumerable voices that to me were merged in the general chatter, but even to me there were some sounds that were unmistakable; there were the ‘howler’ monkeys; I never saw one except stuffed in a museum – he was a small ginger creature – but we heard them roaring like lions most days; in the far distance it was like the noise of the dredgers that once used to attend me lying sleepless night after night at Port Said. There were the frogs, some shrill like those in the South of France, others deep and hoarse. There was a bird which mooed like a cow, named, appositely enough, the ‘cow-bird’, and another which struck two sharp metallic notes as though with a hammer on a copper cistern; this was called the ‘bell-bird’; there was a bird that made a noise like a motor-bicycle starting up; a kind of woodpecker drilling very rapidly with his beak; there were others of various kinds who whistled like errand boys. There was one which repeated ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?’ endlessly in a challenging tone. There was one insect which buzzed in a particular manner. ‘Listen,’ said Mr Bain one day, ‘that is most interesting. It is what we call the “six o’clock beetle”, because he always makes that noise at exactly six o’clock.’
‘But it is now a quarter past four.’
‘Yes, that is what is so interesting.’
At one time and another in the country I heard the ‘six o’clock beetle’ at every hour of the day and night.
But experienced ‘bush men’ say that they can tell the time as accurately by the sounds of the bush as a mariner can by the sun.
Kurupukari, which we reached on the seventh day, was marked large on the map and had figured constantly in our conversation for the past week. There was a flagstaff, certainly, lying flat in the grass, still under construction; it was completed and erected during my stay; later Mr Bain hopes to obtain a flag for it. But there was no landing, no habitations, only a single wooden house standing in a clearing on a slight hill.
The Essequibo bends there, so that the place had the look of a peninsula; the river even at this season was immense, and the wooded islands round which it divided and converged made it seem larger still; a broad creek flowed into it immediately opposite the station; there were sand dunes and rocks, submerged at full flood, but now high and dry, confusing one’s sense of direction; there were cascades and patches of still lake so that one seemed to be surrounded by a system of ornamental waters, and across its vast and varied expanse one could see the green precipices of forest and appreciate, as one could not when directly beneath them, the freakish height of the trees and the gay dapple of blossom at their summit.
The house, like most in the country, was of one storey, raised on piles ten or twelve feet from the ground. The verandah was the living-room with a table and two armchairs, it was also the government office; some tattered, printed regulations, a calendar and an obsolete map hung on the walls; there was a desk with pigeon-holes for licences, forms, stamps; here were transacted the multifarious functions of local government; a tax was levied on passing cattle, grants of land were registered, pilots’ certificates were endorsed, letters were accepted for the irregular river service to the coast. A resident black sergeant of police took charge of them. Under us, between the supporting piles, there lived, under the minimum of restraint, a dozen or so convicts.
Mr Bain’s cubicle had a cupboard, without lock, in which he kept, or attempted to keep, a few personal possessions. This busy place was the nearest thing Mr Bain had to a home, a curious contrast to the trim little official residences of British Africa. In all his huge district there was not one place which Mr Bain could lock up; his life was spent eternally jogging up and down the cattle trail and across the plain to the ultimate frontier station at Bon Success, hanging his hammock in the vaqueiros’ shelters or putting up for the night at the scattered little ranch houses of the savannah, living from year’s end to year’s end in camp conditions except for rare official visits to a Georgetown boarding-house. It was not everybody’s job.
Unsatisfactory news awaited us at Kurupukari; our boat from Bartika had not arrived and Mr Bain, who had hitherto been unreasonably confident about it, suddenly became correspondingly depressing. That was the way in the bush, he said, one had to be used to things like that; there was not much water in the river, no doubt they were having a difficult time at the rapids; it might be weeks before they arrived; they might never arrive at all; that was probably it – the boat had been wrecked and the men all drowned; the barbed wire and the stores anyway would be lost beyond hope. How right he had been to bring me up the trail … and so on.
Meanwhile we were reduced to the milder discomforts of a state of siege. We had a box and a half of biscuits and a tin of milk; and there were great sacks of farine for the convicts’ rations and some tasso.
Farine is a vegetable product made from cassava root. It is like coarse sawdust in appearance; a granulated, tapioca-coloured substance of intense hardness and a faint taste of brown paper. It is eaten quite alone, or with hot water to soften it or more luxuriously with milk or the water in which the tasso has been boiled.
Tasso is prepared in this way. The killing of a beast is an event of some importance in the immediate neighbourhood. Indians get news of it and appear mysteriously like gulls round a trawler when the catch is cleaned. A few choice morsels are cut away and cooked and eaten fresh. The Indians carry off the head and the entrails. The rest is sliced into thin slabs, rolled in salt and hung up to dry. A few days of sun and hot savannah wind reduce it to a black, leathery condition in which it will remain uncorrupt indefinitely. Even the normally omnivorous ants will not touch it. It is carried under the saddle above the blanket to keep it tender and protect the horse from galling. When the time comes to eat it, it is scrubbed fairly clean of dust and salt and boiled in water. It emerges softened but fibrous and tasteless. I can conceive it might be possible for a newcomer to stomach a little farine with a rich and aromatic stew; or a little tasso with plenty of fresh vegetables and bread. The food of the savannah is farine and tasso and nothi
ng else.
For four days there was no sign of the boat. Then, late in the afternoon, one of the convicts reported the sound of a motor. Mr Bain and I hurried down to the river bank. He too could hear it plainly, though it was half an hour before a sound reached my duller ears. Pessimistic to the last, Mr Bain said it was probably some other boat, but in the end, just at sundown, it came into sight, a grey blob very slowly approaching. Their sharper eyes – Mr Bain’s and the little cluster of convicts and police – instantly recognized it as ours. In another half-hour it was there. An open boat low in the water, with an outboard engine. There was a crew of four or five, each with a story to tell. They camped near the boat and long into the night we could hear them arguing and boasting over their fire. We went to bed suffused as though by wine with renewed geniality.
The unloading took all the morning and as I saw my stores packed bit by bit against the wall of my cubicle I began to despair of ever moving them. But Yetto was confident that he and the horse and the policeman could manage them with ease. We swam the horses across the river that afternoon and hobbled them in the corral on the opposite bank so that they would be ready to start the next day. The pack horse took unkindly to the water and swallowed a good deal on the way across.
Everything seemed set for my departure. I had even some kind of plan evolved for my ultimate route. It was possible, said Mr Bain, to take a canoe from Bon Success down the Takutu to Boa Vista. That meant nothing to me but Mr Bain explained that it was an important Brazilian town – next to Manaos the most important town in Amazonas. He had never been there himself but he knew those who had and in his description he made it a place of peculiar glamour – dissipated and violent; a place where revolutions were plotted and political assassinations committed; from there regular paddle steamers plied to Manaos – a city of inexpressible grandeur, of palaces and opera houses, boulevards and fountains, swaggering military in spurs and white gloves, cardinals and millionaires; and from there great liners went direct to Lisbon. Mr Bain made a very splendid picture of it all – so graphic and full of passages so personal and penetrating that it was difficult to accept his assurance that he knew it only by repute. His eyes flashed as he told me of it and his arms swept in circles. I felt that it was a singularly fortunate man who went to Boa Vista and Manaos.
On the eve of my departure Mr Bain and I had an intimate and convivial dinner. Next morning I sent the stores across with Yetto and the policeman; they were to arrange the pack horse’s load and their own and start ahead of me. Soon after midday I went across myself. Mr Bain came to see me off. We found and saddled the horse; I mounted and, after many expressions of mutual goodwill, I rode off alone up the trail.
As soon as I set out on my own, things began to go slightly against me.
I was jogging happily up the trail, feeling for the first time a little like an explorer, when I met the neighbouring boviander squatting moodily on a tree stump beside a pile of tins that were obviously part of my stores. The man grinned amiably and took off his hat. ‘Yetto and Price say to take these back,’ he explained. ‘Horse no can carry. Him lie down all de time.’
‘Lies down?’
‘All de time. Dey beat him with a stick and him goes little little way and den him lie down again. Him no get top side. De boys make pack lighter.’
I looked at the pile and saw that, with a minimum of discrimination, they had abandoned my entire meat ration. There seemed nothing to be done. I picked out half a dozen tins, rolled them up in the hammock at the back of my saddle and told the man to present the rest to Mr Bain with my compliments. Then I rode on less contentedly.
About six miles farther on I came upon the pack horse unsaddled and hobbled, his pack lying on the ground near him. I shouted for Yetto who eventually appeared from the bush where he and Price had been having a nap.
‘Him weary,’ said Yetto. ‘Him no carry pack top-side.’ We undid the loads and rearranged them, sifting out everything unessential from the heap. An Indian boy had appeared mysteriously and I entrusted to him the stores we could not take, to carry back to Kurupukari. Then I rode on ahead to the shelter where we should spend the night. I waited two hours and there was no trace of the baggage. Then I resaddled my horse and rode back. About a mile from where I had left them, Yetto and Price were sitting on a fallen tree eating farine. The horse was grazing near them, the packs were on the ground.
‘Dat horse am sick. Him no go at all.’
It was now late afternoon. There was nothing for it but to return to Kurupukari, so I left Price to guard the stores, told Yetto to follow with the pack horse and rode back to the river.
That ride remains one of the most vivid memories of the cattle trail. Checked and annoyed as I was, the splendour of the evening compensated for everything. Out on the savannah there is no twilight; the sun goes down blazing on the horizon, affording five or ten minutes of gold and crimson glory; then darkness. In the forest night opens slowly like a yawn. The colours gradually deepened, the greens pure and intense to the point of saturation, the tree trunks and the bare earth glowing brown; the half shades, the broken and refracted fragments of light all disappeared and left only fathomless depths of pure colour. Then dusk spread; distances became incalculable and obstacles detached themselves unexpectedly and came suddenly near; and while it was almost night in the trail the tops of the trees were still ablaze with sunlight, till eventually they too darkened and their flowers were lost. And all the pattering and whistling and chattering of the bush at night broke out loudly on all sides, and the tired little horse – who was doing a double journey and, being always on the move, had no instinct for home – suddenly pricked his ears and raised his head and stepped out fresh as though his day were only just beginning.
It was black night when I reached the corral. I hobbled him, took off his bridle and saddle and carried them down to the water’s edge. The other bank showed no light. After prolonged shouting I heard an answering call and twenty minutes later a canoe appeared suddenly at my feet. Mr Bain received me without surprise. He never thought I would get far alone.
Next day there was more reorganization. The sergeant hired me a donkey named Maria and a vain young Negro named Sinclair, who had been hanging about without apparent purpose in and out of the house for some days.
Next day we set out again and reassembled at the place where I had left the stores, Yetto, Price, Sinclair, the horse, Maria, and myself, and began dividing up the loads and the duties. For his half-dollar a day a boy is assumed to be able to carry about fifty pounds for about twenty miles. It was Yetto’s boast, of which the others were quick to take advantage, that he could carry a hundred pounds for fifty miles. I used to see them piling things on to Yetto’s back and him taking them with pride and good humour. Sinclair was an odious youth but he knew a little about cooking. The other two hated him and on the last days went without food altogether rather than take it from him. He asked if he might drive the ass and I said yes. He then made the point that it was impossible both to carry a pack and drive the ass who strayed all over the path and needed constant goading along. In point of fact Maria did nothing of the sort. She quickly got wise to the fact that if she stayed behind with the boys, they unslung their loads as soon as I was out of sight, and put them on her back. Accordingly she used to break away and trot along happily beside the horse. This was maddening for me, because every few miles her pack would work loose and she would start scattering bits of luggage along the trail and I would have to stop and rearrange things.
Every evening Yetto had complaints against Sinclair. ‘Chief, dat boy no good at all. Him too young; him not know discipline.’ Every day I used to decide to pay him off and send him back; then I used to think of Yetto’s detestable cooking and hesitate. And on these occasions Sinclair always succeeded in putting me in a good temper. He would appear with my towel just when I wanted it; he would find a lime tree and unasked prepare me rum and lime when I returned from my bath in the creek; he knew exactly the things I s
hould want, map, journal, fountain pen, glasses, and laid them out just where I needed them beside the hammock. So in spite of the fact that I knew him to be lazy, untruthful, disloyal, sulky and conceited, he remained in my service to the end as far as the frontier.
To this rather absurd little band there attached himself a spectral figure named Jagger. I had seen him, too, moping on the steps at Kurupukari and heard Mr Bain upbraiding him on more than one occasion on some obscure subject connected with the post office. He was a coloured youth in the technical Georgetown sense of the word and in that sense only; for I never saw a face so devoid of a nameable hue. It was a ghastly grisaille except for his eyes which were of a yellowish tinge, the colour of trodden snow, and circled with pink. He loped along with us carrying his own food and belongings; never asking for anything except company, always eager to help with advice. He spoke accurate and elaborate English, in a toneless, lisping voice that would have sounded supercilious had it not been accompanied by his expression of inflexible misery and self-disgust.
I never fully mastered the history of his downfall which was connected in some way with litigation, wills and money-lenders. Yetto explained it quite simply, ‘Him was robbed by his brudders.’
He had fever badly, and on the second day arrived at the midday halt well behind the others, dragging himself along unsteadily. He hung up his hammock, rolled into it and lay with averted face, unwilling to eat or talk. As I rode on that afternoon I began to worry about Jagger. It really looked as though he might be going to die on our hands; in his present state he would never reach the savannah on foot. Here I felt was the time for a Christian gentleman to show his principles; to emulate Sir Philip Sidney.