BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "A Tourist in Africa"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 25: A Tourist in Africa. Ed. by Patrick R. Query. Oxford University Press, 2021. 9780198735311. lxxiv + 234 pp.

Some books get written because the author was moved by the mysterious impulses of creative genius, because his heart was bursting with feelings that he had to put on paper, because he felt an urge to communicate some deep insight into the human condition...

Some books, however, get written because the author desperately wanted to get away from English weather for one or two winter months (not that there's anything wrong with that!). The present work, Waugh's A Tourist in Africa, falls into the latter camp. As explained in the editor's introduction (which is a bit shorter here than in the other Waugh volumes I've read recently, but it's extremely interesting), he often tried to cover the expenses of his travels not only by writing books about them but also by getting himself assigned as a reporter or something of that sort (p. xxvii); but for A Tourist in Africa, his agent made an arrangement with a shipping company that was willing to give Waugh a free first-class ticket in exchange for writing a book about his journey that would “stimulate interest in Africa on the part of the travelling public” (p. xxviii).

On the one hand, this looks awfully meretricious to someone like me, who am still somewhat inclined to think of writers, and artists in general, as romantic geniuses inspired by something transcendent; on the other hand, it is downright touching that a company was willing to spend so lavishly on a writer when they couldn't expect his book to stimulate their business in any but the most indirect fashion. There's no way a business would be that generous today. Besides, the book is far from being a crass advertisement for the Union-Castle shipping line. They gave Waugh a free hand in writing the book, requested some really minor changes in the most hesitant and deferential manner (pp. xxxi–xxxv), and in the end he didn't even make all of those changes, only some of them.

Looking back, it is clear that what really destroyed their business model was the growth of air travel, and there was nothing that Waugh's book could do to stop that (although he does grumble here and there about how unpleasant it is to travel on a plane (pp. 11, 103) — no doubt a genuine sentiment on his part, one that did not need to be stimulated by money from a shipping company :]).

*

Since I read another travel book by Waugh recently, Ninety-Two Days (about his travels in British Guyana and Brazil in 1933), it is naturally tempting to compare the two. The most obvious difference is that in Ninety-Two Days, Waugh was a young man and his travels were arduous and somewhat adventurous, while in A Tourist in Africa (based on a journey made in early 1959), he is very much an old one and his travels prioritize comfort and luxury rather than adventure. There is no bushwhacking here, no complicated arrangements for expeditions on horseback or on foot; he is a passenger aboard ship, plane, train or sometimes car, he stays in hotels or sometimes with friends, everything has been pre-arranged for him.

In fact I was suprised that he should feel and act that old at 55, which is not considered such a very advanced age nowadays; but I guess it was different in his day. He complains of being “hard of hearing and stiff in the joints” (p. 4). And to some extent the grumpy old man may have been a persona that he was deliberately putting on (apparently he “had felt himself to be old for some years” by then, and “ ‘made a pantomime of being an old man’, including brandishing his famous ear-trumpet”; p. 138).

When you consider that even his march through the Guyanan wilderness was not really rich in excitement, it is hardly surprising that his tourist trip across East Africa was still less so. But his strength, both in Ninety-Two Days and here in A Tourist in Africa, lies in the fact that he often manages to make even mundane observations seem interesting, and better yet, to take a break from describing the direct experiences from his comparatively uneventful journeys, and allows himself to wander off on a tangent, often something having to do with the history or sometimes politics of the places he was travelling through. These I invariably found interesting and informative, and often also insightful; they constituted my favourite parts of both books, and fortunately they are scattered thickly throughout both.

*

The first chapter is not about Africa at all, but about Genoa, where Waugh did some sightseeing in the company of an old friend before embarking on his ship (most passengers embarked in London, however; p. 12). My only complaint here is that at times his tone begins to sound a little too much like a tourist guidebook, but fortunately that problem largely disappears in later chapters. Apparently Genoa was noted for its cemetery (p. 6). Waugh reached Genoa by train across France, which gives him the opportunity for some nice vignettes of railway officials and fellow passengers (pp. 4–5).

He was happy to see that the city had recovered well from wartime destruction: the Italians “do not, as do those in authority in England, regard the destruction of a good building as a welcome opportunity to erect something really ugly in its place. They set to work patiently exercising the arts of their ancestors.” (P. 7.) There are little asides like this scattered throughout the book; you can see that Waugh is not keen on modernity. And since neither am I, I invariably found it enjoyable to tag along on his journey. (E.g. he regrets the “influence of Corbusier which pervades the modern east” on p. 23, and the clearing of Zanzibar's old town on pp. 34–5. In Tanganyika, “[t]he Public Works Department is engaged on replacing the spacious and cool houses which the Germans built for their officials with the cramped, concrete structures which are mysteriously preferred by the authorities in Dar”; p. 53.)

His ship took him through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea. They made a stop in Aden (in present-day Yemen), where Waugh remarks on how much the place had changed since his previous visit more than twenty years before (p. 15). He would make similar remarks several more times later in the journey. Exotic locations that used to have an individual character of their own were beginning to modernize and lose their individuality in the process. I can only imagine how miserable he would be today, when that process had gone several steps further in the same direction.

True to his crusty old man persona, he grumbles about the sartorial habits of his fellow tourists: “I in my humble way have suffered for decency. I have worn starched shirts at Christmas dinners in both Zanzibar and Georgetown, British Guiana; but these young people must be almost naked in order to lie in deck-chairs in the shade.” (P. 17.) :)) Paradoxically, although I never liked to dress up myself, I somehow miss the times when people used to wear three-piece suits everywhere. (Later, in Zanzibar, he grumbles about the “shameless” French tourists who “parade the bazaar in ‘Bikini’ bathing dresses” :)); p. 34. — “I wonder how much the loss of European prestige in hot countries is connected with the craven preference for comfort over dignity”, p. 40.)

Apparently the ship had a well-stocked library, and Waugh found plenty of time to read (p. 12). He treats us to an assortment of interesting tidbits* from a book titled Stars and Stripes in Africa (by Eric Rosenthal, 1938; pp. 17–18), about achievements of Americans on that continent (some of dubious veracity). This was quite interesting; but, at the same time, you can't help wondering if he's merely trying to pad out the book, which is short enough anyway (about 100 pages in the present edition).

[*For example, apparently around 1900 several U.S. states offered land “to solve the problem of the Boers by wholesale evacuation” (p. 18).]

They had a five-day stop at Mombasa, Kenya, giving him the time to do some sightseeing in that country; he visited the ruins of Gedi (a medieval Arab city; p. 29) and drove to the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (pp. 30–31).

*

His voyage ended in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania). He spent the next month or so travelling, partly by train, partly by car and partly by plane, across Tanganyika and the two Rhodesias (present-day Zambia and Zimbabwe), before finally taking a plane to Cape Town where he boarded the ship that took him home to England. Some of the places he visited were the typical things that you would expect a tourist to visit — e.g. the ruins of Great Zimbabwe (p. 77) — but really the best parts of the book are about the less obvious things he saw and visited, and luckily there are plenty of those.

There's an interesting section on a failed project, set up by the British government some ten years earlier, to grow peanuts in Tanganyika. The government in question was a Labour one, and Waugh never misses an opportunity to complain about Labour governments; but at least he admits that “[t]he aim was benevolent” (p. 51). And although he is hardly the sort of person that would be keen on decolonization, he admits that “if the Groundnuts Scheme had been conceived and executed by natives, everyone would point to it as incontrovertible evidence that they were unfit to manage their own affairs.” (P. 66. So it's not so much that he has such a high opinion of the natives, as that he has such a low opinion of modern-day big governments. This is not the only remark along those lines in the book.)

Apparently the Masai were employed to help suppress the Kikuyu rebels during the Mau Mau uprising: “The story is told that a patrol was sent out with orders to bring in any Kikuyu ‘arms’ they could find; next morning the commanding officer's tent was surrounded with a heap of severed limbs.” (P. 54.) :)))

Waugh's efforts to attend a Masai initiation ceremony failed spectacularly. He ended up with a driver that spoke only Swahili and had no idea where to go, and when they finally got to the correct location, it turned out that they had got the date wrong and the ceremony would not be taking place for another week (pp. 55–7).

“[K]eep away from hotels run by the British. We have no calling to this profession.” (P. 59. This is one of the passages that Waugh's sponsors, the Union-Castle shipping line, asked him to change, though they admitted that it “is probably very sound general advice” (p. xxxiii). :)) In the end, he kept it.)

Tanganyika used to be a German colony before the WW1, and Waugh visited one of the few Germans still remaining there (p. 63).

Upon entering North Rhodesia, he had to fill out forms which demanded a ludicrous amount of personal information: “the names, ages, sexes, dates and places of birth of children not accompanying me [. . .] What European languages could I write? The oddest demand was to state ‘sex of wife’.” (P. 69.) He has good fun imagining how the government's statisticians might deal with his form, nor does he miss the opportunity to make another barb against modern government: “Here fully displayed are the arts of modern government for which, it is popularly believed, the native races are not yet far enough advanced.” (P. 70.)

He visited the tobacco market at Salisbury (now Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe), which boasted an auctioneer “imported at great expense from New Orleans” (p. 74).

He is disappointed in trying to buy examples of native sculpture: “The savage African art of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which delighted the European and American connoisseurs of the 1920s, seems as dead as the civilized art of Europe.” (P. 80.) But he is impressed by the artwork done at a mission led by a Swiss architect/missionary: “entirely novel and entirely African” (p. 81); “Fr Groeber's achievement has been to make Africans do what none but Africans could have done and what no Africans in this huge region ever did before; to leave a church where they and their descendants can worship, which their descendants will cherish with the pride and awe with which we in Europe survey the edifices of our Middle Ages.” (P. 83.)

He has a fine mini-rant about the changes in terminology for various ethnic and racial groups. In Rhodesia, “a white American is classified as a European and a black American as an ‘alien native’. [. . .] I am told that in the U.S.A. one may say ‘negro’ but not ‘negress’. They like to be called ‘coloured’. But ‘coloured’ in most of Africa means mulatto.” (P. 85.) Etc., etc. In the manuscript he adds: “The rising tide of euphemism is everywhere eroding the sharp meaning of the language.” (P. 210.) And of course, things have only got worse since his time. Much of our society nowadays is in the grip of the woke cult, which is packed with people who spend much of their time trying to think of new ways to be offended and demanding that the rest of society change its vocabulary at their every whim. [By the way, a funny tidbit from the critical apparatus. After discussing a number of terms for blacks which were by then becoming offensive, Waugh sort of shrugs his shoulders and uses all of those terms in an epic, explosive conclusion: “Well, I don't suppose any blackamoors, niggers, Kaffirs, natives, Bantu or Africans will read this diary.” (P. 85.) According to the appendix (p. 211), this sentence was dropped from the American edition of the book :)))]

In another case of supporting the right thing for the wrong reason, he criticizes the ‘colour bar’, not because the latter is wrong and immoral per se, but because in order to make the colour bar work, they had to weaken the class barriers amongst the white people: “There are black porters in the larger shops [in Salisbury] and the white shop-girls are abominably rude to them. They are also rather rude to their white customer, for they are at pains to demonstrate that under God all white men were created equal. The well-paid plumber [in a manuscript he even wrote “over-paid”; p. 213] who comes out to work in a private house expects to sit down in the dining room with the family. He has a black, ill-paid assistant who squats outside. Here, as in England, the champions of the colour bar are the classes whose modest skills many negroes can master.” (P. 87. See also p.  213 for additional material from the manuscript version of this passage.)

Later he objects to apartheid for similarly classist reasons: “Apartheid is the creation of the Boers. It is the spirit of equalitarianism literally cracked. Stable and fruitful societies have always been elaborately graded. The idea of a classless society is so unnatural to man that his reason, in practice, cannot bear the strain. Those Afrikaaner youths [in a manuscript he adds: “with their bulging behinds” :)), p. 225] would claim equality with you, gentle reader. They regard themselves as being a cut above the bushmen. So they accept one huge cleavage in the social order and fantastically choose pigmentation as the determining factor. Cardinal Gracias and the Hottentot are equal on one side; you, gentle reader, and the white oaf on the other; and there is no passage across that preposterous frontier.” (Pp. 105–6.)

“Their monument is a massive erection of granite over thirty feet in height” (p. 95) :]

*

All in all, I enjoyed this book a good deal; more than I had expected. Waugh comes across as a person who liked almost none of the many ways in which the world was changing around him (something I can very much sympathize with), but who reacted to that not with rage or bitterness but with a sort of bemused shaking of the head; he affects a near-permanent attitude of mildly sarcastic detachment, which makes for many funny and incisive remarks that were fun to read even if I disagree with his politics in many fundamental ways.

He clearly does not for a moment believe that governments, whether Labour ones back in England or Nationalist ones in the soon-to-be-decolonized African countries, can accomplish anything good by interfering in people's lives, and he consequently doesn't see any particularly urgent need for decolonization; but then those are the obvious and unsurprising opinions of someone for whom the status quo worked well enough. Commendably, he disapproves strongly of apartheid and racial segregation; but far from commendably, he does so because in his view it is class barriers rather than race barriers that need to be protected and maintained. And he downplays the problems of colonial police violence and racial discrimination by pointing out that plenty of police violence exists in independent India and plenty of racial discrimination in America (where apparently even the pet cemeteries were segregated; p. 106).

At any rate, I liked the fact that he managed to write a book about his travels through Africa on the cusp of decolonization without making politics the central subject of the book; in fact he deliberately pushes politics away from the centre when he concludes the book by saying: “I have had a happy two months and I won't let the weekly papers spoil them for me” (p. 106). This seems like an attitude worth imitating nowdays, when we have not only the papers but also the whole internet constantly preaching doom and gloom at us from every direction.

*

In my previous two posts about Waugh books I complained that there was not much of interest in the appendices with variant readings from the manuscripts; this is not the case here, where I occasionally found interesting scraps of text there, and I mentioned some of them earlier in this post where suitable. Here's another one I liked (p. 151): “I have no wish to spend any time in the Union of South Africa. No country deserves the politicians it gets.” I always hated the old chestnut about every country getting the politicians it deserves, and I'm glad to see that he turned it around here. Of course I don't imagine that Waugh's opinion here actually agrees with mine; I simply think that every country deserves to have good politicians, while he probably means to say that he is a small-government conservative, because all politicians are inevitably bad and it's better to reduce the damage by making the politicians weak and few in number.

The editor's introduction and notes in the present volume are also quite interesting and not too long, and there are commendably few errors and misprints (but I loved “arachaeological” on p. 77). This was a fine book, and I'm looking forward to reading more volumes from this series.

ToRead:

• Maurice Baring: C (1924). Mentioned here on p. 113: “It focuses on upper-class European family life before the First World War, luxuriating in the opulence of an era nearing its violent conclusion.” Waugh praises Baring as “one of the most lovable of men” but complains about the “slap-dash” writing and numerous discrepancies in C (p. 13).
• Alec Waugh: The Loom of Youth. A “scandalous novel” (p. 115) by Evelyn Waugh's brother.
• E. M. Forster: Pharos and Pharillon. Mentioned here on p. 74; a “collection of essays on Alexandria, one of EW's favourite books” (p. 136).

BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Ninety-Two Days"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 22: Ninety-Two Days. Ed. by Douglas Lane Patey. Oxford University Press, 2021. 9780198724186. lxxii + 331 pp. (A scan of the first ed. (1934) is also available on archive.org.)

It turns out that Waugh, besides writing fiction, also wrote several travel books; Ninety-Two Days is about his three-month trip to British Guiana and Brazil in 1933. The editor's introduction to the present edition was very interesting and I enjoyed it much more than the one in Helena. It appears that for Waugh, travel writing was not really something he would be interested in doing for its own sake; he did it partly to keep his name in the public's eye so that people wouldn't forget about him by the time his next novel was ready (p. xxviii), and partly as a source of a bit of extra money and of things that could serve as inspiration for his fiction. His trip to Guiana was the basis of a few articles for newspapers and magazines (which apparently weren't very good and he had a hard time getting them published; p. xxxvii), then for Ninety-Two Days, and then for a novel titled A Handful of Dust (1934).

Even his choice of destination was influenced by practical concerns. (Or was it? At one point Waugh joked that he chose British Guiana because “I had got it confused in my mind with New Guinea”; p. xxxi, n. 14.) It was the only British colony in South America, so Waugh naturally preferred to go there since he couldn't speak Spanish or Portuguese (but apparently this plan was partly frustrated by the fact that even there, Portuguese was the lingua franca amongst the locals in the interior of the country; p. xxxiii, n. 25). It was also one of the least well explored areas of South America; the 1930s were no longer really the age of 19th-century-style gentlemen explorers, but Waugh could, just barely, still claim to be doing something resembling anthropology. (Apparently he even toyed with the idea of enrolling in a university and getting a degree in that field; p. xlvi.) Nor would it be bad for publicity that a part of his trip was going to extend into Brazil, where Percy Fawcett had disappeared a few years before, generating an enormous amount of media attention.

Moreover, it turns out that Guiana had been exciting people's imaginations for a long time. Sir Walter Ralegh claimed it was the seat of the mythical El Dorado, an Indian chief so rich that he covered himself in gold dust (hence the name, ‘the golden one’ p. xl). Its unclimbable table-mountains (such as Roraima) tantalized naturalists with the prospect that otherwise extinct species may have survived there; and in the hands of fiction writers, these turned easily into monstrous ape-men and dinosaurs. I knew that Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Lost World is set in that area, but here I learnt of another interesting-sounding novel, though not widely known today: The Devil-Tree of El Dorado (1896), by Frank Aubrey (p. xliii).

The introduction also mentions a number of non-fiction books by earlier explorers and travellers to the area; I was particularly intrigued by Among the Indians of Guiana (1883) by Everard im Thurn (p. xliii) — German (and Austrian) noblemen with von were a dime a dozen in the 19th century, from time to time you encounter a zu, but an im is rare indeed. (According to the Wikipedia he was actually British, but his father had immigrated from Austria.)

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Ninety-Two Days is apparently very well-regarded in Guyana nowadays (pp. lii–liii, n. 100).

*

As for Waugh's travelogue itself, I really enjoyed reading it and I couldn't help being impressed by how he managed to take a journey in which, to be perfectly honest, nothing interesting ever happened, and turn it into a book that is practically never boring. Somehow he keeps managing to come up with something interesting to say on every page, finding some little event to describe or some observation to make, etc.

If there is any downside to this, it might be that all these little things don't really add up to anything bigger than that; you accompany Waugh on his journey, you have a good enough time (better than he did in the sweltering jungles of Guiana, one imagines), but when you reach the end you wonder what the point of the whole thing was. But this is not hardly really a downside; after all, there's no need why a journey like this should have some greater purpose, or why a book about it should impart some greater message to the reader. As Waugh says at the conclusion of the book, it “makes no claim to being a spiritual odyssey” (p. 158), but it was a bit of strenuous adventure for him and “I had seen several different sorts of life being led—rancher, missionary, Indian, diamond hunter—which I could never have imagined. I had added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.” (P. 159.)

Interestingly, in the introductory chapter Waugh insists that “self-respecting writers do not ‘collect material’ for their books, or rather that they do it all the time in living their lives”; he travelled to Guiana simply because he had “a fascination in distant and barbarous places” (p. 2). Methinks he doth protest a little too much (see also the note on p. 166), but he has a point as well.

I didn't know that he had a brother, Alec Waugh, who was also a travel writer (“with a papal gesture” the two brothers divided the world amongst themselves :), p. 7). In his The Coloured Countries (1930), he described among other things a stay at a grotesquely bad hotel on the Caribbean island of Trinidad (included as an appendix in the present volume, pp. 317–22); and now on the way to Guiana, Evelyn Waugh stayed in the same hotel, wondering if he would have any trouble due to this “family connexion” (p. 1), but the manager was surprisingly good-humoured about it (p. 8).

Upon reaching Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, he was interviewed by journalists from a local paper that had a policy of interviewing every first-class passenger upon arrival (p. 10). But he soon realized that he had a somewhat hard time explaining to people what exactly the purpose of his journey was. On one occasion he mentioned wanting to photograph the Indians; “‘We know what you want,’ they said with winks, ‘you want to take the girls naked. Well, your best plan is to go up to Bartika and get a few of the tarts there to pose for you. You can get the proper feather ornaments from the Self Help shop. That's what most of the American scientific expeditions do.’ ” (P. 13.) :))

The supplies he bought for the journey into the interior included chlorodyne; according to the editor's note, this was “primarily a mixture of laudanum, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform” which “quickly became one of Britain's most popular patent medicines, widely advertised for conditions from diarrhoea to insomnia and headache.” (P. 184.) Good times :)))

The staple foodstuffs of the country were cassava flour and tasso, or dried beef (“it is even, so I was told, put under the saddle above the blanket to keep it tender and protect the horse from galling”, p. 36 :S). Waugh found them uneatable (p. 71, 94). There was also a fermented drink called cassiri (“made from sweet cassava roots, chewed up by the elder members of the community and spat into a bowl”, p. 107; from time to time, Indians would hold parties where the whole village got drunk, consuming a whole vat of the stuff in the process).

On the way into the interior of the country, Waugh first travelled for a week together with one Mr. Bain, a garrulous government official; later he had to make his own arrangements. The travel was mostly on horseback, slow and laborious, first through jungles and later a savannah, areas with a very sparse population of ranchers, and I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for Waugh and his Guianan servants, suffering the incessant heat, rain, insects and the like, though he does seem to bear all this with remarkable good humour. Motor vehicles were very rare in the interior, and gasoline expensive (p. 59); see p. 62 for a very short stretch where Waugh was the passenger in a motor van.

Waugh becomes the victim of a vowel shift: “ ‘Chief, do you want to see this boy's arse?’ / I misunderstood him and said no, somewhat sharply. / ‘Fine, young “arse”,’ said Sinclair. ‘Your “arse” plenty weary. You want new “arse” to go Bon Success.’ ” (P. 46.) :))

One of the ranchers he met along the way turned out to be an insane religious maniac. “You could always tell a Freemason, he said, because they had VOL branded on their buttocks.” (P. 55.)

He stayed for about a week at a mission, St. Ignatius, and remarks on the contrast between this small, modest establishment and the crowded ones he had seen in Africa (p. 63). Here there were just two priests, one of whom was away all the time, constantly on a “circuit” from one Indian village to another (p. 65).

There was a merchant operating on the Brazil-Guiana border, with stores on both sides of the Ireng river so that it was his customers and not himself that had to smuggle the goods across :) (pp. 67–8). “He has no competition within two hundred miles” (p. 68) — a good illustration of how remote this area was.

Waugh crossed the border into Brazil and went as far as the town of Boa Vista, which had been represented to him as prosperous and modern (p. 73); alas, it turned out to be a small, dilapidated dump of a town, with a sluggish, fever-ridden population more inclined to crime than work (“they are mostly descended from convicts [. . .] [t]hey are naturally homicidal by inclination”, p. 78; “a society in which murder was regarded as being as common and mildly regrettable as divorce in England”, p. 79 :))), and more to indolence than to either of those. What little brief, unnatural prosperity there may have been in the place a few years earlier had been the result of schemes by various investors to set up business ventures, all of which had foundered in very short order (pp. 79–82). But Waugh endured his disappointments with good humour, and wrote in a letter home that “the streets are paved with gold which gives a pretty effect especially towards sunset” (p. xli).

He stayed at Boa Vista for a good while, hoping to travel downriver to Manaos, but it proved impossible to get a boat and eventually he decided to head back to Guiana; and even that was hard to arrange — his efforts to procure a horse, saddle, attendants, and supplies were met with so many complications that the whole thing is downright ludicrous (pp. 85–9).

He got back to St. Ignatius, but then decided to return to the coast by a different route than the one he took on the way there; some of this was through very remote areas very rarely visited by Europeans (p. 105). He is not really pretending to be conducting anthropological research, but he does make some observations about the curious habits of the local Indians; e.g. when a woman gives birth, it is her husband that takes to the sick-bed and is treated by the whole community as if it were he, and not she, that had just been through an exhausting ordeal (p. 110). A woman giving birth to twins is regarded by them as an evidence of infidelity (p. 132). The Indians also believe in a malignant force called the Kenaima, but Waugh says that different people give such different accounts of it that it's impossible to decide what exactly this belief is really about (pp. 117–19). Elsewhere he remarks on the resemblance between the Indians and the English in that both have a retiring character (p. 25).

For a few days, Waugh even had to travel on foot, together with several porters and one of the missionaries from St. Ignatius (p. 117). Eventually he reached the camp of one Mr. Winter, a gold and diamond prospector whom he had previously met in Georgetown (p. 130). There's a funny story of an Indian girl who was raised in the town, then returned home only to find she now didn't really fit into either environment: “She found a strange, naked woman who was her mother, eagerly welcoming her to a one-roomed hut [. . .] More than this she found a naked young man who had been selected by her mother as a husband. [. . .] The original suitor, at last losing patience with her superiority and aloofness, married the mother and the two proceeded to make the hut still less habitable for her.” :)) (Pp. 139–40.) Fortunately the story has a relatively happy ending; the young woman was hired by Winter as a cook and proved to be excellent at her job.

The last stage of Waugh's journey was downstream by boat, though this wasn't exactly trivial either since the Potaro river, which he was travelling on, was interrupted at several points by waterfalls, including the famous Kaieteur (pp. 144–6). There he spent a night in a house that was being let to tourists (p. 150) — a sign that this area was not that remote any more, and he was rapidly returning towards civilisation. Still, his impression of the interior of Guiana was that of an area from which civilisation was retreating: some decades before people had been trying to farm or ranch, to gather rubber, prospect for gold or diamonds, but now all that was declining or gone (p. 151). I wonder what those parts of Guyana are like nowadays. It's nice to imagine that civilisation, which otherwise spreads everywhere like cancer, managed to leave some bit of wilderness largely alone; but even if that was true in Waugh's time, I doubt it is still true now.

About his fellow passengers on a boat: “I have occasionally heard it debated whether negroes have an unpleasant smell. These certainly had.” (P. 157.) :)))

In a few more days he was back in Georgetown, whence he returned to England. (“There was some slight discussion at the Customs as to whether stuffed alligators were dutiable as furniture, but in the end these were allowed in as scientific specimens.” :)) P. 159.)

*

The present edition also contains about 60 pages of explanatory notes, which I found quite interesting, and about 115 pages of critical apparatus, in which I found pretty much nothing interesting whatsoever. It records countless small variants between Waugh's manuscript and the printed version, and on a few occasion there are variants between the British and the American edition, but nothing really important for a casual reader like me. In some books the critical apparatus gives you some bits of material that the author removed from the manuscript while preparing the final printed version, but there's nothing of that sort here. (Speaking of manuscripts, I was interested to read that Waugh's handwriting was hard to read; see pp. lvii–lviii.)

Errors

Much like in Helena, there are plenty of errors to be found. Sad!

• “my means of a balloon” (p. xlii, np. 59) should be “by”;
• “Boa Visa” (p. liii) should be “Vista”;
• “ ‘theatrical;” (p. lvi, n. 108) should be “ ‘theatrical’ ”;
• “Manoas” (p. 59) should be “Manaos”;
• “Canadian Healing Oil (according to a full-page advert in the Sydney Mail, 30 Jan 1987” (p. 204) — this is from a note about dubious patent medicines, and I was doubtful that something like that would have been advertised in 1987; and sure enough, the correct date is 1897, and moreover the ad is far from being full-page — it covers half of a column, and the page has four columns;
• “fans of a tiger” (p. 188) should surely be “fangs”;
• “‘Nother” (p. 239), in a quote from p. 21, where they correctly used the apostrophe, “’Nother”;
• “68.455–69.772” (p. 265) should say 472, not 772;
• “St. Petersberg” (p. 267), in a quote from p. 73, where it is spelt correctly “Petersburg”;
• “medieval Peru” (p. 214) in a quote from p. 112, where it is spelt “mediæval”;
• “in Appendix )” (p. 295) should be “in Appendix A)”;
• Everard im Thurn is described as a “German-born explorer and colonial administrator” (p. 313), but his Wikipedia page says he was “born in Camberwell, London, the son of an Austrian immigrant banker”;
• “Bback” (p. 317) should be “back”;
• “Arnold Bennet” (p. 317, n. 2) should be “Bennett”;
• “For the illustrative quotations” etc. (p. 322) — a whole paragraph of what was surely meant to be the editor's introduction to the notes in Appendix A appears mistakenly here in Appendix D, in an excerpt from Alec Waugh's The Coloured Countries.

ToRead:

• Paul Fussell: Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980). Mentioned here on p. xxvii, n. 1. After WW1 prevented travel for a few years, there was apparently a “renaissance of travel literature” in the interwar period, and Waugh can be seen as a part of that trend.
• George Miller Dyott: Man Hunting in the Jungle: The Search for Colonel Fawcett (1930). Mentioned here on p. xxxiii, n. 22.
• C. Barrington Brown: Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana (1876). Mentioned here on p. xlii, n. 59.
• Everard im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, Being Sketches Chiefly Anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana (1883). Mentioned here on p. xli, n. 57, and elsewhere.
• Frank Aubrey: The Devil-Tree of El Dorado: A Romance of British Guiana (1896). An adventure novel set in Guiana (pp. xlii–xliii). He also wrote Queen of Atlantis: A Romance of the Caribbean (1898) and King of the Dead: A Weird Romance (1903) “about a lost race in the Amazonas” (p. 311).
• Neil Whitehead: Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (2002), by an “anthropologist who claims to have had terrifying personal experience of the phenomenon” (p. 215).
• Alec Waugh: The Coloured Countries (1930). A travel book by Evelyn Waugh's elder brother, about various tropical countries; mentioned here on pp. 8, 166, 173 and elsewhere. It appeared in America as Hot Countries. Alec Waugh also wrote a number of other interesting-sounding books, some of which are on archive.org, e.g.: The Sugar Islands: A Caribbean Travelogue (1949) and Island in the Sun (1955), a novel set in a fictional Caribbean country.
• Arnold Bennett: The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902). A mystery novel, mentioned on p. 317, n. 2.