BRITISH GUIANA (11) 325 
mining activities in the interior, seems destined to become a town 
of some importance. 
I looked across the wide expanse of water to the Penal Settle- 
ment, where I had spent several interesting months with my 
hoatzins and other queer creatures on my previous expedition, 
which now seemed only a short while ago. 
In those days Sir Edward Denham made a revolutionary move 
by sanctioning the building of a road (roads are scarce in British 
Guiana) from Bartica to the Potaro River—a stretch of about one 
hundred miles. The idea was to make a more accessible route to 
the great Kaieteur Falls as well as facilitating transport to and 
from the interior. Guiana’s rivers are unfortunately not navigable 
for any distance at a stretch as rapids bar the way. 
The road certainly served a useful purpose when it was opened, 
but in latter years it has fallen into disrepair, and its state when | 
was last there was such that a journey along it in anything but a 
modern highly sprung vehicle was something of an adventure. 
Unfortunately, I had to make the journey in a rather ramshackle 
bus with hard seats, and this provided me with the worst journey | 
can ever remember. 
At the start of the memorable ride I was wearing a respectable, 
though old, pair of flannel trousers, but when I arrived at the gold 
diggings some miles beyond the Potaro River I had to don my 
mackintosh before presenting myself to the manager and his wife, 
as I found the violent tossing had worn the seat of my trousers 
away! 
After passing through miles of jungle, the sudden encounter 
with a modern mining settlement seemed wholly unreal. I was 
able to see the large dredges at work which eat their way into 
the banks of a small river, extracting the precious metal and then 
casting out the waste soil behind. The dredges were thus always 
afloat, though the river was slowly changing its course all the 
time. The manager showed me a large bar of gold, worth several 
thousand pounds, that had just been smelted, and which repre- 
sented the output for the month. 
To me, as a naturalist, the whole scene of operations seemed 
one of desolation and a ghastly blot on the landscape; but gold is 
