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Cecil Mrs. Clementi
Through British Guiana to the summit of Roraima
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4066338079824
Table of Contents
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THE DEMERARA RIVER
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CHAPTER I
THE DEMERARA RIVER
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Men travel far to see a city, but few seem curious about a river. Every river has, nevertheless, its individuality, its great silent interest. Every river has, moreover, its influence over the people who pass their lives within sight of its waters.—H. S. Merriman: The Sowers, chap. ii.
British Guiana, as first seen from the shoal-water near the Demerara lightship, is a mournful and monotonous picture. Mud flats, fringed with courida and mangrove, stretch endlessly along the shore. Never a hill is to be seen. The coastal flats are four feet below the level of high spring tides, and the Atlantic slops over the sea dams in yellow waves of muddy water. The wide expanses of rich sugar-fields and smiling rice lands begin about a mile from the seaside and stretch “aback” to the “wet savannahs,” by means of which they are irrigated. These wet savannahs are vast natural swamps converted artificially into shallow lakes by “stopping off” their seaward outlets. South of them spreads “the bush,” that great primeval forest so hostile to man, but sheltering in its mysterious recesses a million varieties of insects, a multitude of beasts and reptiles, and a wealth of bird life unequalled, perhaps, in any other part of the world.