Evelyn Waugh’s travel writings offer such a litany of complaint that by his third expedition one suspects he was just in it for the grousing. But despite a characteristic whinging tone, Ninety-Two Days evolves into a delightful if somewhat broody trudge through the tropics. Waugh’s gift for word portraiture was never better.
The lands being visited here were the most distant yet for Waugh, the colony of British Guiana and a vast neighboring section of northern Brazil. Hot weather, bad roads, awful food, leaky roofs, frenzied insects, and an ever-present sense of torpor were just some of the tortures Waugh endured for his readers.
He is not shy about his suffering. “There are a hundred excellent reasons for rough travelling, but good living is not one of them,” he writes.
What were his reasons for going? Ostensibly he was curious about a far-flung remnant of the British empire left behind “in the general explosion of South American self-government.” Guyana, as it became formally known after achieving independence in 1966, featured the world’s tallest waterfall, a dormant ballata industry, and a miniscule amount of diamond mining. Otherwise, Waugh says, not much.
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| Dadanawa Ranch, sometimes described as one of the most remote working cattle ranches in the world, as seen today. It was a stopping point for Evelyn Waugh, who carped both about the wind-blown accommodations and the brattiness of the children living there. Image from https://thingsguyana.com/the-dadanawa-ranch-one-of-the-oldest-largest-and-most-isolated-ranches-in-the-world/ |
He came to see how Western civilization existed on the margins of the known world, only to find it barely did:
Instead we had overtaken civilisation in its retreat; the ground was worked out, the beaches sifted of their treasure, the trees bled to death for ballata, the stores derelict and once busy stations in process of evacuation. It was as though modernity had put out sensitive snail-horns and, being hurt, had withdrawn them.
Waugh fills the pages pondering the limits of progress as he takes in scenery and makes comments. He follows a rambling path across savannahs and forests, meeting native Indians, black, white, and mixed-race settlers scraping together modest but undemanding existences. He’s at times judgmental, but not as waspish as he can be:
The Indians, I learned later, are a solitary people and it takes many hours’ heavy drinking to arouse any social interests in them. In fact the more I saw of Indians the greater I was struck by their similarity to the English.
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| Guyana as it exists today. Waugh journeyed from Georgetown, its capital, southward across cattle trails and basic roads. Just beyond Guyana on the left of this map is the Brazilian town of Boa Vista, which preoccupied Waugh for much of his travels. Image from https://fity.club/lists/suggestions/guiana-inglesa/ |
Guyana in Waugh’s handling is a society of peaceful coexistence, though not without tensions. At one point, he comes across a sect of black Guyanese he identifies as Jordanites, polygamists from Jamaica. One is speaking: “What for you black men afraid ob de white man? Why you ascared ob his pale face and blue eye? Why do you fear his yellow hair? Because you are all fornicators – dat is de reason. If you were pure of heart you need not fear de white man.”
Waugh notes hearing something in Guyana’s main settlement, Georgetown, about a wondrous city just over the Brazilian border named Boa Vista, which he is keen to visit. For much of the trip he records his mounting excitement about Boa Vista, imagining a banquet of culture and luxury in a part of the world he otherwise finds torpid and deprived.
During his journey to Boa Vista, he and his party encounter the corpses of cattle abandoned along the roadside. Something like 40% of a rancher’s stock can be lost this way, with all the hazards of the deeply forested trail. It was a once-robust part of the Guyanese economy now gone to seed.
Guyana remains today one of the world’s least densely populated counties, more thinly settled by comparative land area than Canada. Waugh wonders at why his countrymen ever thought it a worthwhile place to colonize, as well as efforts underway to still turn a profit. “The next ten years or so will show which will be victor, the bush or the road,” he writes, leaning in the former direction.
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| A photograph by Waugh from the book showing one of the Catholic priests he met who ministered to Guyanese's Indian population. Waugh spends some time on anthropological analysis: "The life of every Indian in these parts is overshadowed by an ever present, indefinable dread, named Kenaima." Image from https://shapero.com/en-us/products/evelyn-waugh-ninety-two-days-first-edition-110529?srsltid=AfmBOopysDYSAaRtFU_cSVQ8O5zgn8H0CUtm0-7ZV7nsRzeiaERc2Ivc |
Meanwhile, he marvels at the density of Guyana’s ant population and the all-encompassing nature of its nights:
In the forest night opens slowly like a yawn. The colours gradually deepened, the greens pure and intense to the point of saturation, the tree trunks and the bare earth glowing brown; the half shades, the broken and refracted fragments of light all disappeared and left only fathomless depths of pure colour. Then dusk spread; distances became incalculable and obstacles detached themselves unexpectedly and came suddenly near; and while it was almost night in the trail the tops of the trees were still ablaze with sunlight, till eventually they too darkened and their flowers were lost.
What Waugh really was doing in Guyana was gathering material for his next novel. A Handful Of Dust turned out one of his greatest works, most of it set back home in England but with a long plot detour set in British Guiana that emphasizes its isolation.
It is the unpeopled emptiness of this place that makes it so disturbing for the novel’s protagonist, Tony Last, especially when he meets the ominous Mr. Todd, patriarch of an extended family who spouts warped religion at him and eventually makes clear Tony is his prisoner.
In Ninety-Two Days Waugh proudly notes the addition to his “treasury of eccentrics” one Mr. Christie, a rancher who bears a strong resemblance to Mr. Todd. Not that he is menacing; Waugh himself seems quite charmed with him but there is an air of foreboding about the man and the shuddering way he is regarded by those around him.
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| A first-edition of Ninety Two Days with jacket art emphasizing the tropical locale. Clearly this was an attraction for Waugh before he arrived for which he was ill-prepared. "Most journeys, I think, begin and all end with a sense of unreality," he writes. Image from https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30381072956&ref_=o_5_sc |
Christie has a lot of ideas about religion, it turns out, and is always evangelizing, not really caring no one is listening:
He told me that he was at work on a translation of the scriptures into Macushi [a native Guyanese language], “but I have to change and omit a great deal. There is so much I do not agree with…but I am not worried. I expect the end of the world shortly.”
After crossing into Brazil, it is some days more before his party reaches Boa Vista, only to discover the worst hellhole of his entire expedition. The population consists largely of homicidal criminals, the buildings are all shabby, and worst of all, it is dull, dull, dull.
But this time he’s not going to be negative, no sir, not at all:
I could give bananas to the captive monkey and I could study the bottled worms in the laboratory; I could watch the carpenter in his rare moments of industry, sawing up lengths of plank. There was really quite a number of things for me to do, but, in spite of them all, the days seemed to pass slowly.
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| Kaieteur Falls as seen from the air. "The scale was immense so that the margin of the forest shrank to a line of scrub," Waugh wrote about his first impressions. "[I]t was only by an effort that one could remind oneself that these were the great ramparts that had towered over us all day." Image from https://www.mediastorehouse.com/reuters-images/aerial-views/aerial-view-kaieteur-falls-southern-guyana-19599072.html |
Waugh winds up the book with a return to Guyana, where he records his impressions of Kaieteur Falls, which at 741 feet stands as a higher cataract than Victoria Falls and Niagara Falls stacked together:
It fell sheer from its seven hundred-odd feet, for the cliff had been hollowed back in the centuries and the edge jutted over an immense black cavern. At the foot dense columns of spray rose to meet it so that the impression one received was that the water slowed down, hesitated, and then began to reascend, as though a cinema film had been reversed.
Other bloggers note the generic nature of the title Ninety-Two Days as reflective of a lack of direction, and you do see that. But Waugh’s open boredom often gives way as he describes the sights and people he encounters. He really seems to enjoy himself itemizing his discomforts and his insect bites in detail. “It is by crawling on the face of it that one learns a country,” he writes.
Hardly a pleasant image, yet Waugh sells it with his
replenishing resources of wit and curiosity.
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