Eldorado Revisited

One of the many sharp differences between my generation of English writers and our successors’ was that we got about the world. Robert Byron, Mr. Graham Greene, my brother Alec, Mr. Christopher Sykes, Mr. Peter Fleming, Lord Kinross—to name a few of my own acquaintance—spent much of their youth in enterprising and arduous journeys. To find in the atlas a place about which one knew absolutely nothing, to go there for that very reason, was our preparation for what seemed likely to be a sedentary middle age.

For some—Mr. Greene in particular —the habit has proved ineradicable. I now regret having neglected so much of the then civilized world, now given over to tourists or terrorists. I regret the time and money wasted in clambering over the glaciers of Spitzbergen when I might have visited the temples and palaces of Indochina, but it was a more exhilarating occupation than attending literary congresses at whose sessions, it seems, modern young writers see the world. One of the places I visited during that unencumbered decade was the hinterland of British Guiana — Raleigh’s Eldorado. Thirty years afterwards I went back.

EW

About the Author

Evelyn Waugh

Featured Tags

One of the many sharp differences between my generation of English writers and our successors’ was that we got about the world. Robert Byron, Mr. Graham Greene, my brother Alec, Mr. Christopher Sykes, Mr. Peter Fleming, Lord Kinross—to name a few of my own acquaintance—spent much of their youth in enterprising and arduous journeys. To find in the atlas a place about which one knew absolutely nothing, to go there for that very reason, was our preparation for what seemed likely to be a sedentary middle age.

For some—Mr. Greene in particular —the habit has proved ineradicable. I now regret having neglected so much of the then civilized world, now given over to tourists or terrorists. I regret the time and money wasted in clambering over the glaciers of Spitzbergen when I might have visited the temples and palaces of Indochina, but it was a more exhilarating occupation than attending literary congresses at whose sessions, it seems, modern young writers see the world. One of the places I visited during that unencumbered decade was the hinterland of British Guiana — Raleigh’s Eldorado. Thirty years afterwards I went back.