“What are they exploring?” he asked, rising from his chair. He was even more suspicious of Chinese logging operations in the Essequibo basin, fifty miles east of the Rewa, and the “exploratory” permits recently granted them by the government. He mentioned a footprint-shaped hole in a rock near his home village of Aishalton, said to mark the place where Jesus took his last step before vaulting into heaven, then veered into a description of the open-pit gold mine that had brought strangers, money, alcohol, and motor vehicles to a place that had rarely known them. He believe in Christianity, read his Bible every day, everything.”īrian admitted that he liked to listen to gospel music in the mornings, but he seemed to hold his piety lightly. “But when I drink,” Jose added, “I am probably more evil than you see me now.” “Today,” added Brian, “when I walked down to bathe, I hear a body call me-like one of you call me. Just below the falls, Jose said, a young man had been killed by a falling tree, and you could hear him crying all night if you slept in that place. All of them faced the same direction except one, as if he’d had enough company for the day.Īround the ghost light, the conversation turned from dreams to village politics, and then to the voices you sometimes hear in the river, especially at night. Just before we arrived back at Thorn, we passed a row of swallows huddled on a branch inches above the surface of the river. Two disoriented piranhas jumped into the boat, and Rambo giggled and chucked them back, and the sky was so dark and clear that calm stretches of water mirrored stars I’d rarely seen-the fine curve of Orion’s bow, the horns of Taurus.
We’d returned an hour earlier from a night drift, a subdued and spooky experience: bats thrummed around our heads, twisted branches loomed from the water like skeletal hands, and the eyes of fawn-sized rodents called pacas glowed in Jose’s spotlight.
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