Gerald Durrell - THREE SINGLES TO ADVENTURE

I said nothing. I agreed that the wilds are the best place for relaxation, but I wondered if Bob had any idea what being in the wilds with an animal collector was like. Judging by his remarks he was under the impression that collecting consisted of lying in a hammock while the animals walked into the cages themselves. I decided not to disillusion him until we were a bit further away from Georgetown .

Bob was an artist, and he had originally come to Guiana in order to paint a series of pictures of various Amerindian tribes. When he arrived, however, he found that the places he wanted to go to were all underwater and the rivers impassable. While he was sitting in Georgetown waiting, like Noah, for the floods to subside, he met us. On hearing that I intended to leave very soon for my first sortie into the interior, he suggested, with an innocence that does him credit, that he should accompany me. As he pointed out, it would be more fun to go on an animal-collecting trip than to sit waiting in Georgetown , and when we returned the floods might have gone down and he could go and paint his Amerindians. Unfortunately for Bob, he never got around to his objective; instead he spent his whole time in Guiana accompanying me on various trips to the interior. He was never allowed to put a brush to canvas, and towards the end he had no canvas to put a brush to, for we had taken it to make snake boxes out of, for sending shipments by air. He had to eat and sleep surrounded by a fantastic assortment of birds, beasts and reptiles; he had to swim across lakes and rivers, wade through swamps, struggle through forest and grassland, getting scratched and bruised, hot and tired. As we started off to Adventure on that fateful day I could foresee all this, but Bob was apparently oblivious of the danger he ran in getting mixed up with an animal collector.

The ferry chugged importantly alongside the stone quay on the other bank of the Demerara, and we proceeded to unload our luggage in a leisurely fashion, by the simple process of throwing it over the rail to Ivan, who was standing on the quay below. When the last piece had been thrown over, and we had descended and joined Ivan, a lugubrious individual uncoiled himself from a barrel on which he had been seated and lounged forward.

"Is you all to catch the Parika train?" he inquired.

I admitted that this was our intention, if we could find some means of getting our luggage to the station.

"Youall will have to hurry… train should've left ten minutes ago," said the lounger, with a certain relish.

"Good Lord!" I said, in a panic.

"How far is the station?"

"Bout half a mile," said the lounger."I’ll get a truck for you all and he disappeared.

"What happens if we miss the train, Ivan? Is there another one later on?"

"No, sir. We'll have to wait until tomorrow if we miss it."

"What, wait here" said Bob, gazing round at the muddy river bank and the two or three dilapidated sheds dotted about.

"But where are we going to sleep?" Before Ivan could enlighten Bob our lounger returned at a shambling run, pulling an ancient trolley behind him.

"Youall will have to hurry," he panted."I hear the train leaving."

As we frantically piled our luggage on to the trolley we could hear in the distance the coughs and wheezing grunts of an engine getting up steam. We fled down the road towards the noise, the trolley clattering after us, propelled by Ivan and the panting lounger. We galloped on to the station, perspiring and gasping, to the intense interest of an odd assortment of humanity that was collected on the platform.

They greeted our hot and dishevelled persons with a few derisive catcalls that quickly turned to cheers as our trolley hit a rock and most of the luggage fell off. By a superhuman effort we flung the last box in as the train pulled out, and, leaning out of the window, I flung a handful of small change at the face of the lounger, who was desperately trying to keep pace with the train, holding out his hands imploringly.

The tiny train rattled along manfully, dragging its row of grimy carriages between the glistening paddy-fields and patches of woodland, at one point attaining a speed that seemed dangerously like twenty miles an hour. The landscape was green and lush, seeming as though it had just been swept and washed in preparation for us. Everywhere one looked there were birds: sparkling white egrets strode solemnly along in the short, tender, green rice; from the canals patch worked with water-lilies, jacanas flew up at our approach, in a sudden blaze of buttercup-yellow wings; in the blue sky snail hawks flew in stately arabesques, and in and out of the bushes flew dozens of military starlings, their crimson breasts flashing like lights against the green. The landscape seemed overloaded with birds; one glance, and you saw the egrets and their shimmering reflections, the jacanas mincing long-toed on the lily leaves, the bobbing yellow heads of the marsh birds among the rushes. My eyes ached with peering, now after one fleck of colour or a gaudy fluttering in the reeds, now following the swift flight of another across the fields.

Bob slept peacefully in his corner of the carriage, and Ivan was somewhere in the depths of the guard's van, so I watched this ornithological pageant by myself. Soon, however, a stiff breeze sprang up, clouding the canal waters and blowing into the compartment all the smoke that the engine was proudly producing. Reluctantly, I shut the window; to judge from its appearance, it had not been cleaned since it had been put in. My view of the countryside being cut off, I followed Bob's example and fell into a doze. Eventually the train dragged itself into Parika with a vast effort, and we awoke and descended stiffly on to the platform. We found that, with a delicacy of timing that seemed out of place in the tropics, the river steamer was already in and making loud peevish hootings, as an indication that she wanted to resume her journey. We hurried on board and sank gratefully into the deck chairs that Ivan had procured for us. The steamer bobbed and chattered, drew away from Parika, and headed down the dark waters of the Essequibo, weaving her way through a maze of little green islands that dotted its surface. We sat in our chairs and dozed, ate bananas and admired the tangled beauty of the islands we passed. Presently we were served with lunch in the tiny saloon and then replete with food, we returned to our chairs in the sun. I had just succeeded in dozing off when I was rudely awakened by Bob shaking my arm.

"Gerry, wake up, quick … you're missing a wonderful sight."

The steamer, presumably in circumnavigating a shoal, had crept in close to the bank, and we were only separated from the dense undergrowth by about fifteen feet of water. I peered sleepily at the trees.

"I can't see anything. What is it?"

"There, on that branch … it's moving now, can't you see it?"

And suddenly I saw it. In a blaze of sunlight, among the leaves, sat a creature out of a fairy tale. A great lizard, his scaly body coloured with all the various shades of jade, emerald, and grass green, his heavy head gnarled and encrusted with great scales, and beneath his chin a large, curving dewlap. He lay negligently across a branch, clasping the wood with his big, curved claws, dangling his whip-like tail towards the waters below. As we watched he turned his head, ornamented with its frills and protuberances, and started to feed casually on the young leaves and shoots about him. I could hardly believe that he was real, and I doubted if he was the same species as the dull, lethargic, greyish-coloured creatures which I had seen in zoos labelled as iguanas. As we passed directly opposite him he turned his head and gave us a haughty stare with his small, golden-flecked eyes. He looked as though he was just whiling away the time waiting for some Guianese St. George to come and do battle with him. We gazed at him spellbound, until distance merged his green body in distinguishably with the leaves on which he lay.