Several days’ travel up the Potaro are the Kaieteur Falls, four hundred feet wide and eight hundred and twenty feet high, loftiest for their width in the world—unless a neighboring cataract recently discovered by Father Cary-Elwess proves greater. The sight of these, thundering along in the heart of the unknown wilderness, is said by the few who have viewed them to be impressive in a way that civilized and harnessed Niagara can never be again. But it would almost have doubled my time in British Guiana to go and see the Potaro take its famous plunge; and the ever-increasing call of home was urging me to hurry on. The launch that came down the branch next morning from some gold mines owned by Chinamen was a filthy old craft under a negro captain; yet anything that runs daily seemed beautiful in this region. I took Langrey with me; but “Harris,” with the instability of his race, had decided after all not to “go down to town,” dreading the great metropolis, perhaps, as some of our own countrymen do the rush and roar of Broadway. Langrey was useful to cook and bring me lunch from the private stores I had left, for nothing was served on the launch and without my own valet and servant I should have been considered a common person indeed. We plowed the placid, tree-walled Essequibo without a pause until two in the afternoon, coming to Rockstone, a bungalow rest-house on stilts surrounded by tall grass and the forest, where I not only had a real meal again, but slept in a bed for the first time in thirty-three days—and found it hard and uncomfortably high in the middle. I was the star guest at the Rockstone hotel, not merely being the only white man, but because—if so incredible a statement could be believed—I had arrived without ever having been in Georgetown, making me as awesome a curiosity as if I had suddenly crawled out of a hole from China. Rare, indeed, are the travelers who enter the Guianas by the back door.
A little train with a screeching English engine and half a passenger-car rambled away next morning through forest and white-sand jungle, the charred trunks of trees standing above it and several branch lines pushing their way out in quest of the valuable green-heart timber. Within an hour we were at Wismar on the Demerara River, a small stream compared with the great Essequibo, about the width of the Thames and barely two hundred and fifty miles long. I had passed, too, from the mammoth County of Essequibo, forming more than two thirds of British Guiana, to the comparatively tiny one of Demerara, containing the capital and often giving its name to the whole colony, which is completed by the several times larger County of Berbice on the east. The colony was first settled along the three large rivers which drain it, and the counties took their names from them. The Lady Longden, a river-steamer that seemed luxurious against the background of wilderness travel behind me, descended a stream yellowish-black in color, like most of the inhabitants. Indian features had almost completely disappeared, though the mixture of races was perhaps greater than in Brazil. Besides the ubiquitous West Indian negroes, with their tin bracelets and their childish prattle, there were many Chinamen and Hindus. Celestials so Anglicized that they could not speak a word of Chinese—though one surely could not praise the English of most of them—mingled on the wharves (here called “stellings”) with East Indians dressed in everything from their original home costumes to the complete European garb of those born in the colony. Chinese women in blue cotton blouse and trousers, exactly as in China, came down to see off sons and daughters dressed like summer strollers along Piccadilly, and who carried under an arm the latest cheap English magazine. It startled me constantly to hear English spoken around me, not only by those I subconsciously expected to speak Portuguese or some other foreign tongue, but by ragged negroes who carried the mind back to Brazil, by East Indians, and by broken-down Chinamen lying about the “stellings.”
For the first time the country was really inhabited, with frequent towns breaking the forest wall and sometimes a constant succession of bungalows, shacks, and churches, all built of wood and having an unmistakable Anglo-Saxon ancestry. As in Brazil, the seacoast of the Guianas holds the overwhelming majority of the population. Every few miles we whistled and slowed up before a village, often half hidden back in the bush, with only a few canoe “garages” on the waterfront, to pick up from, or toss into, a “curial” paddled by blacks, Chinese, or Hindu coolies a passenger or two, a trunk, or a letter. We saw a great many of these Guianese dugouts during the day, the negroes using any old rag as sails to save themselves the labor of paddling upstream, so that some were wafted along by former flour-sacks and others by what had undoubtedly once been trousers. Several times we overtook rafts of green-heart logs lashed to some lighter wood, as green-heart will not float, with whole families living in the improvised boathouses in the center of them. Even before we sighted Georgetown I had undoubtedly seen more human beings in one day than during all the rest of my time in British Guiana.
The river grew ever broader, its immediate shores more swampy and less inhabited, with an intertangle of mangrove roots that showed the mark of the tides. Cocoanut-palms appeared again, for the first time since leaving Pará; then an occasional royal palm and the belching smokestack of a sugar plantation, of which many on this coast have been cultivated continuously for a hundred years, yet which rarely stretch more than ten miles up country. An ocean breeze began to fan us; down the now wide and yellow river appeared a blue patch of open sea. Makeshift tin and wooden shacks commenced to peer forth from the bush, which itself gradually turned to banana patches, and suddenly, about four o’clock, Georgetown burst forth on a low nose of ground at the river’s mouth. Though it seemed to jut out into the sea on a point of jungle shaped like a plowshare, there certainly was little inspiring about the approach to it—a low, flat city, as unlike the towns I had so often come upon in the past three years as the smooth, kempt hills of England are like the picturesque helter-skelter of a half-cleared South American wilderness.
As to a hotel, I had been recommended to the “Ice-House,” which seemed so strikingly appropriate to the climate that it was with genuine grief that I gave it up. But it turned out that it housed negroes also, and one’s caste must be kept up in British Guiana, even though one pay several times as much for the privilege. In the most exclusive hotel a negro servant came to look me over when I applied, and to report on the color of my skin and my general appearance before the white manager came to repeat the inspection while I stood gloating over an armful of mail. Then with an awed whisper of “All right, sir,” the servant led me to a chamber—which, after all the fuss, was not inordinately luxurious—turned on the electric-light and backed away, asking whether “de gentleman” desired hot water.
“Hot water?” I exclaimed, my thoughts on my correspondence.
“Fo’ yo’ shavin’, sah,” replied the model servant.
Verily, I had wholly forgotten many of the common luxuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
CHAPTER XXI
ROAMING THE THREE GUIANAS
The white steamers of the “Compagnie Générale Transatlantique” take two leisurely days from Georgetown to Cayenne, which I spent in furbishing up my long unused French. I had not intended to leave British Guiana so soon, but it would still be there when I came back and transportation between the three European colonies of South America is not frequent enough to scorn any passing chance with impunity. Four typical Frenchmen of the tropics, in pointed beards not recently trimmed and the white toadstool helmets without which they would no more expect to survive than if they left off their flannel waist-bands, put themselves, unasked, at my disposal. It was still dark on the second morning when there loomed out of the tropical night three isolated granite rocks, with what was evidently a thin covering of grass and bush and dotted with scattered lights. Their official name is “Isles du Salut,” but the more popular and exact term for the whole group is that properly belonging to one of them—“Devil’s Island.” The water about them is very deep, and our ship went close inshore. Soon two boatloads of people, rowed by deeply sunburned white prisoners in the tam-o’-shanter caps of Latin Quarter studios, appeared through the growing dawn, tumbled a few passengers and the baggage of a family from Paris aboard us, then the commander of the isles and his kin and cronies were rowed back again from their monthly excursion to the outside world.