Читать книгу Through British Guiana to the summit of Roraima онлайн

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It is a tantalizing river. Twelve miles wide at its mouth; two miles wide at Bartika, where the commingled Cuyuni and Mazaruni join it; and still fully the same width at Rockstone, where the Demerara-Essequebo Railway strikes it—nevertheless, its innumerable cataracts and rapids make it a snare and an illusion to the navigator. In fact, the raison d’être of the Demerara-Essequebo Railway is to short-circuit the extremely dangerous series of cataracts between Rockstone and Bartika, in which many lives have been lost. By crossing the low divide between the two rivers, the traveller reaches the Essequebo at Rockstone, well above these dangers. He then has a navigable stretch of sixty miles before him to Tumutumari.

Watersmeet of commingled Cuyuni and Mazaruni Rivers with Essequebo.

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This short-circuit, however, misses some interesting country. At Bartika, thirty miles below Rockstone, the commingled Cuyuni and Mazaruni Rivers flow into the Essequebo, and very beautiful is the watersmeet of the three stately streams. On one hand, the shining waters of the Cuyuni invite one, as the morning mists roll away, to follow its gleaming track to Venezuela; whilst, on the other, Mazaruni, “black water,” as its Indian name implies, though flecked with spume from its dread cataracts, has lured on many a diamond-seeker to the very shadow of Roraima’s unscalable precipices.