We will lunch on the rocks and then drift back, we hope, by dusk. Noodles, tiny fig bananas and rum appear -- along with thin sandwiches again inexplicably filled with mustard. By the time we cast off, our crew is pleasantly buzzed. The river has swollen 2 to 3 feet higher with the rains, and the modest rapids we crossed with ease are now raging. We bounce through them, ricocheting off submerged rocks and fallen trees. My adrenalin is peaking, but no one else seems terribly concerned. Somewhere in here, we lose the mahogany-colored bow.

"My Gawwd," says Colin, a bit later. "Where is the bow?"

"Fell in the water," says Velda, who seems quite amused by this.

"Gone overboard," says Kamesh, equally humored by it.

"The water. My Gawwd. The water. Oh my. The bow is forever lost."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

I am headed finally to Iwokrama today. Down the Road I go again, this time in a more modern Land Cruiser with brakes, traveling an hour and a half more beyond Surama, all the way to the edge of the massive Essequibo River. Both the vehicle and the East Indian driver are from Iwokrama, funded by a kettle of international environmental aid monies. We pass colorful land tortoises, more tegus, a Mikushi on a bicycle. We rumble over narrow bridges made of fat wooden beams the size of railroad ties.

We stop to reconnoiter a particularly nefarious series of ruts, and I hear the sun bees -- large bumblebee types -- ringing loudly from inside the towering jungle, happy for this luminous, rain-free day. I walk to the Congo palms at the jungle edge and listen closely. Just above the ring of the sun bees comes the sweet two-note refrain of the toucan.

A modest wooden sign welcomes us to the Iwokrama Rainforest Preserve. Soon afterward, the jungle falls away to reveal the broad Essequibo. From here, I climb into another longboat for the short ride downstream to the field station of the preserve. As we approach, I notice the station is modeled on a typical Amerindian village -- wooden structures with thatch roof, up on stilts for both ventilation and safety from flooding.

I stow my gear in one of the huts, take a quick look around and see a group of rangers, all Amerindians, assembled on chairs under a tent. I meet Vibert A.V. Welch, a big black-skinned man from Georgetown. Vibert, whose English is accented with a deep Caribbean-African patois, tells me how the scientists from around the world make new discoveries in this pristine landscape just about every time they look. "Iwokrama now has the best documented fauna in Guyana," he says. Indeed, it may be ground zero for snakes and frogs. "Just in two weeks, a team of herpetologists found 11 new species."

As for the tented rangers, they are having their bush knowledge augmented with insight about sustainable use of the forest, says Vibert. In the works is a grand vision -- bioprospecting, education and training, preparation to guide the sort of tourists who will go to the ends of the earth to see rare birds and plants.

Part of the mission, Vibert tells me, is to record and catalog the complex and often mystical bush knowledge that has been passed along by oral tradition for centuries. There are, after all, some 2,000 plants in the wildly diverse Amazon Basin used by Amerindians -- both medicinally and spiritually. Ironically, as ethnobotanists revel in the rich cultural-natural texture of the Guyanese interior, the government back in Georgetown is granting large mining and timber leases on indigenous land.

I climb back into a boat, this time with two Amerindians, Rodriguez Anton and Errol McBirney. We will visit some ancient petroglyphs today. Although I am nearly accustomed to the Anglicizing of local names here, I have to admit McBirney gives me a start. But both are good traveling companions, easy to smile and eager to share their local bush knowledge. Downstream on the Essequibo we go now in a smaller aluminum skiff, the Takatu, one of the field station's official boats, a 40-horsepower Merc pushing us faster than I've been yet in the last week.

Errol is wearing a plaid ball cap with a Calvin Klein jeans logo, flip-flops, a khaki shirt and pants; Rodriguez, his long black hair curling over his collar, is decked out in a black cowboy hat with a miniature horseshoe emblem on the front, long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Both are carrying machetes and hand lines for fishing. This time, there are life jackets. "Better put them on," says Errol. "There will be rapids, I think."

And sure enough, a set of healthy Class III rapids is thrashing just upstream, complete with standing waves. I notice that two young boys from a nearby village are riding through them in a log dugout. "They are playing," says Errol. "Something to do."

We run the jungle-rimmed Essequibo for nearly 40 miles, bouncing over more rapids, portaging the boat at the edge of others, crossing water that boils, eddies and swirls. The river mysteriously narrows and widens and I realize we are zigzagging through and around islands. Little white-rumped swallows skim over the surface like jet-propelled leaves; terns with bills as big and yellow as bananas dive and chatter. "The Essequibo comes out of the Amazon somewhere," says Rodriguez. The entire time, we see no more humans, not a single dugout.

A few white beaches rim the edges of the shore. At low water, says Errol, beaches are everywhere, including sandy shoals in the middle of the river. Most of the rapids become exposed rocks. And the water, seeping from jungle creeks, is tannic black, not brown like it is now from the recent rain.

Finally, immense round boulders rise up from the water with a thin cover of lichens, looking like giant baby heads. Beyond the baby heads, we pull over to another clutch of rocks. Both men hop out and I follow. Rodriguez bends down and traces his fingers over etchings in one rock. They are at least 3,500 years old, he says. "A fox here ... a scorpion here ..." I look into an opening where one boulder leans against another and see a finer glyph, a stick figure of a man, protected here from the elements for more than three millenniums.

At lower water, many glyphs can be seen, says Rodriguez. It strikes me that lots more people may have lived along this river at one time, and I wonder out loud where they went. Rodriguez looks at me briefly. "Yes," he says, inscrutably, and then tosses out a hand line, fishing for piru for dinner.

The rain is again falling in sheets. We sit quietly in the boat and drift through the forest to the squawk of distant parrots and the howl of monkeys. I am deep in now, soaked to the skin by the Cashew Rains, but warmed with a feeling of utter security that I seldom feel back in my more efficient world. If Shawndell were here, I'd marry her and end up, years later, losing my prize mahogany-colored bow in the rapids and not caring a lick about it. "We make it back by dark," says Errol. "I think."

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