Bacchanal Time by Henry Shukman

Friday morning in the City Gate minibus station, downtown Port of Spain. A high reedy voice resonates through the tiled complex, flowing over a lilting calypso beat and over the heads of the commuters streaming off their buses. It’s the last weekend before Carnival, and the music is emanating from a small bar called 'De Mystic Inn,' where a row of early-morning drinkers lines the counter. In the rich early sunlight, the drinkers’ glasses and bottles mist invitingly; a distilled breakfast looks just the thing.

There is apparent cause for celebration. Every time the song’s chorus comes around, blaring from a big black speaker, the drinkers throw back their heads and launch into song, mouths agape, and reach across the counter to shake the hand of the smiling barman. Then, they take well-earned pulls on their beers or rums.

The barman, a man with a shaved head, neat moustache, gold tooth and a supple sizeable belly visible through his white string sweater, grins and banters with his customers, eyebrows raised winningly.

Roy Lewis (Authorised to Sell Liquor at the Following Hours: Any Time, Any Day) has reason to smile. He is not only landlord of the Mystic Inn, but also Mystic Prowler, a well-known calypsonian, and, since last night, Calypso Monarch 1998. Just 12 hours ago, he was pacing the boards in the grandstand of the Queen’s Park Savannah dressed in a pink tux, stirring up a crowd of thirty thousand with his rousing hymn to great men, 'Look Below the Surface.' His wife Donna, just now doing the accounts on top of the Coke freezer behind the bar, wears a yellow T-shirt bearing the same legend. Above, perched on the fridge, stands the giant silver cup which he won (along with a new Honda Civic and $50,000).

Mystic Prowler is an appealing man, with or without his tremendous win. There’s self-assurance about him, an easy composure, that makes one like him at once. I ask him: "Is it going to change your life?" He shrugs. "Nothing going to change me, man. I mature now. Fourteen years I didn't sing, you know. I went and studied metaphysics, mysticism. People told me song and God don't mix. I had to go to the back side of the desert to find out if it is so."

He found, evidently, that it was not.

"I comfortable now. I have the mentality and quality of love." He smiles convincingly. "And while studying, I got perfect pitch."

You can hear it. So can the whole bus station. Prowler’s voice soars effortlessly from the speaker up into the highest tenor heavens, then swoops back down to earth like a hawk, mingling with a grumble of saxophones.

A growl of delight along the bar, fists knocking. "Yeah, man. Right, right." How many, after all, can count themselves regulars at the counter of the Mystic Monarch himself?

Mystic Prowler, Roaring Lion, Attila the Hun, Mighty Sparrow, Lord Kitchener... What is it with these calypso names? Lord Nelson presented himself once at Immigration in London Airport, gave his name, and was summarily sent back to Trinidad. A calypsonian is a strange creature. There’s really nothing like one of Trinidad’s native singers: a cross between an arch entertainer and a preacher, a prophet and a prankster, a man of wit and of wisdom too, a man (or woman) whose job is to lambaste his government and exhort the best from his people, a guide, a leader, a social barometer, a figure credited with destroying and sustaining governments, with changing the face of society - and society’s dance steps too. Calypso is that rare thing, a native music that actually appeals to everyone, no matter where they are from. Its infectious lilting beat has been known to coax a smile from the dourest Puritan, and to lure ministers into outrageous bouts of hard-core wining, the triple X dance form exclusive to T and T.

Calypso, which ruled the world’s airwaves in the Forties and Fifties, and almost did again in the early Eighties, is nothing less than what you’d expect from Trinidad, the coolest island in the Caribbean. Beside Trinidad, the other islands with their coconut-sentinelled hotels and darling rum shacks and emulsion-white beaches look pretty, little and just a bit dull. After Trinidad, in fact, anywhere looks dull. What other island fifty miles by fifty incorporates scenery of a continental grandeur, with mountains, jungles, swamps and rolling plains, as well as the de rigueur miles of coconut strand? Where else on earth can boast every race in its population, yet no racism, and where else does an entire nation unite once a year to throw the greatest party possible?

East Indians, Africans, Syrians, Chinese, Corsicans, French, English, Lebanese, Spaniards who can trace their arrival back to the sixteenth century - Trinidadians are all of these, but first and foremost they are Trinis. For an island of just over a million souls, the place has an extraordinary self-sufficiency, not to say self-confidence. Where does this come from? Partly from the oil and natural gas fields which make Trinidad one of the wealthiest nations in the region, free of a humbling dependence on tourism. It’s sometimes called the Caribbean Tiger. Partly too, perhaps, from the knowledge of belonging to a society composed of every race, a kind of proto-globalism, a crucible of the future... and the future looks good. Trinidad boasts more than its fair share of holders of the Miss World sceptre. (The eugenicists had it all wrong. Inclusion is the way, not exclusion.)

But most of all, surely, it comes from one thing. Hostesses from Washington to Wimbledon, from Southhampton to South Kensington may pride themselves on their cocktail parties, their marvellous lunches; but they should cower and grow pale, if not green, before the party with which the world’s season begins and ends, the party that the whole island of Trinidad hosts once a year, and to which the world flocks if they can possibly find a seat on an aeroplane. Back on Park Avenue, they have no idea what it means to host the Greatest Party on Earth.

I first came to Trinidad a lifetime ago, in 1990. Then I was a blushing musician who through some West London contacts had landed a gig as that most sought-after of occupations, a calypso trombonist. I spent three weeks with mouth glued to mouthpiece, blaring the hymnic horn lines of calypsos into a microphone at volumes I would not have believed tolerable to the human skull. I walked around in a daze by day, my head, my whole body ringing like a bell, then by night received once again the black blows to the frame delivered by the towering walls of speakers and my own treacherous brass bell.

Carnival is a season - a nonstop series of fetes beginning after Christmas and rolling up to Carnival itself, the two days when the long wave breaks open all over the streets of Port of Spain. I spent those two days strapped into a cramped seat on a flatbed truck that knocked and throbbed its way around the thronged streets from dawn till dusk and then from dusk till dawn. Round the clock, no time to prize my lips clear of the instrument to pour in a little refreshment. This was Carnival, man, the music don't stop.

We - Blue Ventures, a top Soca band - were caged, paraded for the constant and apparently unalloyed delight of a thousand dancers clad in sequined and spangled next-to-nothings. We had to rely on our own music to transport us to that other realm only Carnival knows how to take the human spirit to.

It worked, sort of. By the end I drifted around the city, picking my way across the battlefield of the Queen’s Park Savannah, Port of Spain’s great park, littered with the bodies of collapsed, consummated couples, and wandered the deserted post-holocaustic streets feeling no need to search for a meaning to it all; the meaning was abundantly plain. Carnival was good for the soul. Carnival loved a human being. For once each year, the old gods were released from the coop where the church had penned them and welcomed back into fellowship with man. Like banished dogs, they never could understand why they had ever been shunned. Also like dogs, they bore no grudge. All they wanted to do was play.

Bacchanal they call it. Certainly Bacchus was there (along with his cousin Fernandes Vat 19). Thor danced with Isis, Zeus with Kali, Calliope with Votan. See there? The long blond-haired Swedish guy grinding against the 'red-skin' girl, the Syrian lady with the African guy, the pink Brit (a spillover from the cricket tour) jamming with the Indian woman? It’s not merely the fact of hosting the world’s biggest annual party that gives Trinidad its extraordinary flavour, but also that all races unite in it. A French festival by origin, for the sake of a near-Eastern religion, with African beats, East Indian cross-beats, European melodies and harmonies - the only race squeezed out of the Carnival mix are the Amerindians (and there are professors who profess to hear Amerindian origins in the newsheet format of calypso, which used to serve as a bush radio - there was even a time when the news was literally sung by a calypsonian on Radio Tobago). Somehow over the last ten decades this wonderful festivity was mutually concocted by ex-slave and ex-slavedriver, by smallholder and shopkeeper alike. A giant act of communion, an act of forgiveness even. No wonder Bishop Tutu baptized Trinidad the Original Rainbow Society. Not to mention that the suicide rate among Trinidad’s 1.2 millions drops to nothing, zero, nobody for six months after Carnival.

Rio’s may be bigger, but it’s more commercial, more of a show - whereas here anyone at all can come on down and play mas - that is, buy a masquerade outfit and dance through the streets with a masquerade band. And it’s time I experienced this Gargantua of a party from the right side of the speakers, not caged in a truck, not attached to eleven feet of brass. So I have come back, to fete, to play mas, to get on bad. To see if Carnival really works the way it's supposed to.

But there is more to Trinidad than Carnival and Calypso.

Three years ago Trinidad was having a hard time. Time magazine ran a piece likening it to the Wild West - a lawless place wasted by hoodlums and drug traffickers where you couldn’t walk around without being raped and pillaged. Word now is that things are better. I wanted to come and find out for myself. Which I did: the economy is now enjoying a boom unparalleled since the Oil Days of the Seventies, the D.E.A. has actually managed to clean up the drug problems, and a follow-up story is overdue. Money, visitors and exports are up. The news is Trini has never looked better.

I wake up in a hillside villa in the suburb of Goodwood Park. Across the valley the wild hair-do’s of two palm trees shake in a breeze. A scintillating celestial brilliance has invaded the island this morning. A good day for getting out of the city.

I head off in search of some old acquaintances who live up on the North Coast. Out of town the highway rolls eastwards onto the flatlands of Central Trinidad, a plain of swamps and sugarcane fields. In the town of Arima my memory lets me down and I get lost in an endless new development known as Malabar III. Eventually I stop in at a small Shouter Baptist church to ask directions.

It’s a little blue building, more of a shelter, standing in its own grove of banana trees. The hall is empty, all the windows open to the hot day. I’m about to leave and try elsewhere when an old woman wearing a copious skirt and a tattered cardigan appears from a back door.

"You come to pray?" she asks.

I clear my throat. "No, actually. I just wanted directions."

"Directions?" She steps closer, between the bare white pews. "See this?" She drops to her knees and clutches hand to hand in front of her breast.

I take a step back.

"I does pray everlastingly to the Lord," she offers by way of explanation. "Like so. That’s the only directions you need. Just pray and pray for forgiveness." I thank her and back out before the preacher shows up. Shouter Baptists, also known as Shango Baptists and Holy Rollers, long banned under colonial rule, are named for their propensity to shout while seized by the Holy Ghost, or by any of various African deities thinly cloaked in the guise of saints.

A friendly truck-driver leads me to the right road. Soon I am heading straight for the bank of green mountains to the north, Trinidad’s Northern Range, a dreamy gathering of lofty old volcanoes slumbering under a carpet of lurid jungle. Trinidad has a grand beauty all but unknown elsewhere in the Caribbean - tremendous green mountainsides plunging to green bays, headlands grander than those Noel Coward might have known of an evening at Bluebird, and unvisited white beaches.

It’s the weekend, and today seems to be the day for the Trini-bears’ picnic. In every river naked brown children frolic while parents solemnly pour out glasses of rum beside the open trunks of cars. At every spring that plumes down a rock, where bamboo pipes have been fitted to create rudimentary faucets, families have parked and spread themselves out to play; and to feast on rotis, bakes, doubles, on bottles of the ubiquitous Carib beer (There’s a little Carib in all of us, runs the ad), and to enjoy the tinkle of fresh water.

The little road, one of only two connecting the remote North to the Central Plain, winds and switches back on itself as it climbs, depositing me before one glorious view after another. I come round a bend and am confronted by a sheet of over-exposed green; another curve, and I turn into a hillside of deep blue, all glossy and shady. Then a house of cream woodwork appears, with a red tin roof, all alone up a mountainside. The homes here are more like tree houses, nestled among the dense foliage, the spreading branches. At night, they light up like the homes of a forest race.

I stop in at the Asa Wright Nature Centre, an old plantation converted into a forest reserve over thirty years ago. After an excellent local lunch (which even wins complimentary grunts from a French ambassadorial party) in the old wooden great house, I sip my coffee on the verandah overlooking a deep valley, while hummingbirds whir past, inches from my face, scuffling in mid-air for dominion over the honey-feeders.

I’m not good with birds, and you need to be to name the innumerable winged congregation here. Trinidad has over 400 bird species, a continental figure harking back to the days when the island was connected to South America. Bright green tanagers like chips of emerald chase night-blue birds with brilliant yellow legs, a glossy blackbird darts back and forth while oropendulas write their easy freehand across the valley. This is the aerial equivalent of a tropical fish-tank. I could spend all afternoon gazing out from my armchair.

But the North Coast beckons. I duck and spin onwards, downwards, towards the cloudy expanse of blue Caribbean. The helter-skelter road deposits me in the town of Blanchisseuse (the Laundress), a fishing settlement spilling down from the green hills onto a series of beaches and coves.

Here lives Hinkson Beatrice, a woodsman I spent a few days with years ago, in a camp out along the coast where the road doesn't reach. It is one of the Godsends of Trinidad’s North Coast that no engineer has yet managed to devise a road right along the steep bays of the shore. A road winds around from either end, but the thirty miles in the middle are still pristine, unreachable except by foot or boat.

Hinkson Beatrice, a lithe man on the far side of middle age, of indefinable race, has a day-long smile stretched into his cheeks, and his eyes glint kindly. He speaks in a murmur, a mellifluous muddle of words. Years ago, when I was last here, he used to go off each night from the bush camp with a kerosene lantern and a homespun rifle to hunt for lapp and agouti and other forest mammals, out of which he would make stews with the coconuts, garlic, peppers and plantains that grew around the camp. Sometimes he would stand on the rocks and cast lines into the glass-green waves, hauling in with his bare fingers hefty snappers that lay gasping while their colours faded in the sunshine.

Today he lives in a large concrete house with a wife, surrounded by an orchard of fruit trees. I'm surprised to find that he remembers me.

"How long it is?"

"1990," I remind him.

"Oh gosh. How many’s that?"

From 1990 to 1998 seems a fairly simple piece of arithmetic, even to an innumerate like myself. Apparently not. Hinkson’s cousin Neville is there too. He has been putting in long hours at the local rum shop, and pipes up now. "Let me see." He begins counting off the years on his fingers. "1990, 1991.... 1997...1998."

"How many years you get?" Hinkson asks.

Neville carefully counts back all the fingers he has marked off. "Nine. I get nine."

"Nine years," Hinkson murmurs.

"So you see how people could remember people?" Neville declares. "Give me your hand. Is plenty years."

He shakes my hand firmly. We all have a good laugh, and celebrate the reunion with some coconuts, which Neville climbs up a ladder to retrieve from the nearest palm, getting himself covered in biting ants in the process. Hinkson and I slap and brush him down.

Then something possesses me to inquire what the population of Blanchisseuse is.

"The population quiet and cool," Hinkson informs.

Blanchisseuse, Las Cueves, Maracas - all the beaches along the western part of the North Coast may be quiet and cool normally, but today, on the weekend before Carnival, they are hopping. Music throbs across the bays, and hordes of 'limers' hang out in the surf, on the sand, half-dancing, half-splashing, half-beachballing to the beat. A shark’n’bake seller tells me: 'Just like Ash Wednesday' - which is the biggest Beach Day of the year. As the sun slips into its final radiance, the road back through the mountains down to Port of Spain is a constant traffic jam of cars, all growling with Soca music.

The Savannah is the spiritual heart of Trinidad. A great open space, at times incredibly dusty, at times incredibly green, it’s surrounded by hills on one side, downtown on another, and by the Magnificent Seven on a third - a septet of splendidly monstrous mansions from colonial days. In the middle, in the heart of hearts, is the grandstand where the annual contests of Carnival are played out.

Tonight, the Saturday before Carnival, is Panorama: the battle of the steel bands, the pans of Pan. The whole stadium is lit up with diamond-white arc lights.

After a mistaken attempt to enter the VIP suite, I then stumble up against the guard of the VVIP suite.

"VVIP?" I ask.

"Presidential Retinue," comes the curt reply.

"And the President himself?"

"VVVIP, I suppose you could say." A hint of a grin breaks the stern face.

Enough clowning. Music shakes the whole stadium, rising like gas or light or mist or a simile cut loose from its moorings into the night. I have to get in.

Exodus Steel Orchestra - over a hundred members - are rocking through their number. In a press pen near the front I run into Pelham Goddard, their arranger, dressed all in white and clutching a bottle of White Label whisky. He can’t sit still. He rocks about on his chair, emphasizing the rhythms that his minions should be emphasizing themselves. A smile, a grin of relief, an 'Ah, sounding sweet, boy,' when they hit a nice groove.

It’s quite a scene in here. Thirty thousand spectators, a fantastic din of music clattering, booming, bathing the crowd in harmonies deep as the ocean. It’s already one A.M. and the night has a long way to go. There’s a wonderful thrill at realizing that everything important, and everyone Very Important, is staying up right through the night. Night is ruptured, bereft of its hegemony. The Radio Tempo interviewers with their fat black headphones, the DJ’s at their sound desks, the judges each with their own white desk lamp and white plastic table, the scoresheets and clipboards and grey-uniformed security guards and officials in jeans and identity cards, not to mention the stream of huge steel orchestras and the crowds themselves in either stand, all sitting in their dark rows with no intention of getting up to leave... and they’ll all be here till dawn. All fences are torn down. Night has no dominion, nor sleep, no duty, nor self-discipline...

Carnival is in the air. Whatever you think: it would be nice but I shouldn't - you should! Everyone else is too!

I never could get in touch with the steel band obsession. I could admire, but it was only when I got close, really close, that I understood why they are called the Eighth Wonder of the World (that copious category). You need to be close enough not so much to hear as to ingest the music. Once your intestines are physically inveigled by the beat, and understand it all by themselves, then suddenly you see why the tenor players bow so intently to their work, why people give up just about anything to be part of a well known band. Outside the stadium, out on the black night-time Savannah where the bands warm up before entering the stage and you can get right among them, is a magic land of rhythm, lights, dark crowds milling about and talking, talking. The constant hypnosis of human interaction touches some part of the brain not normally reached and you realize you have entered the magic world too. The trees become green cushions, the sky an upholstery of stars.

Nineteen bands are due to play tonight. I leave after number nine, and stroll around the Savannah, basking in night warmth and the distant music rising from the grandstand. "Ficus Benjamina, Ceylon Willow," says a wooden plaque nailed up in a beautiful bushy tree with a trunk like candle wax. Great handfuls of aerial roots dangle from the darkness of the crown. How oddly genteel, that plaque, with the steel bands drumming across the park. It’s good, I reflect, that they found something to do with the thousands of oil drums left on the island by the G.I.’s after World War Two. It seems typical of Trinidad - to make music out of war. As the Calypsonian David Rudder says: "Here we don't kill each other with bullets, we do it with songs." The hills dissolve into the night leaving lights floating high up in the sky like stranded ships.

Sunday I feed up good in preparation for Carnival Monday. At the Breakfast Shed, a warehouse down by the docks where giant women in giant hats serve up giant plates of food, some say you get the best - anyway, the biggest - meal on the island.

Along my bench conversation turns inevitably to Carnival.

"Is like alternative medicine," offers a bank official in shirt and tie. "Is therapy. Basically, any other country in the world, you have so many people coming together, is frightful. Here they are all one."

He bows to his stewed chicken, dishing it out of its bowl onto a heap of rice and yams.

I tell him that I'm planning to play mas.

He’s uninterested. "You know, we also have a form of democracy here unlike anywhere else called calypso. People look at the politics and write social commentary."

I nod. But up the table my Carnival plans have not gone unnoticed. Several large ladies hum and nod to one another. "He go play mas," I hear.

"No! He from England!"

"Still he go play mas."

One woman dressed all in brown calls out to me: "I have nephews and nieces in England."

"Whereabouts?"

"I don't know," she exclaims. "All I know, when you call, is a long number, long so." She demonstrates with her hands.

The bank man continues to ruminate, talking into his plate: "Another nice thing is you meet people you haven’t seen in years. All the family will come down to Carnival from Toronto and London."

I nod again, thinking of the dutiful family get-togethers of England, compared to this one.

The woman in brown, having devoured two platefuls of rice and vegetables, is getting impatient for more food. "Jacky!" she calls out to one of the women in the tiled cooking cubicle. "If you don't want me to call you, bring me more food one time!"

Sunday afternoon: registration time. Of the 30 or so masquerade - or mas - bands, varying in size from a few hundred to a few thousand revellers, aesthetic snobbery impels me to choose Peter Minshall’s band 'Red.' I remember once during a nighttime break in my playing with Blue Ventures eight years ago I found myself in someone’s house talking to an Englishwoman who was crying over the beauty of Peter Minshall’s costumes that year. "I mean, nobody knows," she lamented. "Nobody knows what that man does."

Minshall now is widely known, having designed the opening ceremonies of the last two Olympic Games, and is widely thought to have elevated Carnival design to an art-form. "This year, I'm just giving you a colour, that’s all. It’s yours to play with," he told me over lunch in Veni Mange, the island’s prime hang-out for the creative crowd. (In the corner, Nobel poet Walcott sucking down glass after glass of coconut water - he’s on the wagon; at the next table, the Director of the acclaimed Trinidad Theatre Workshop; at our table, La Minshall himself, and David Rudder, calypsonian supreme, the Bob Marley of Soca.)

Normally Carnival bands are a rainbow riot. This year Minshall is breaking all precedent by clothing his entire band in one colour, scarlet.

A slender man, all in white but for a shock of bright orange hair on top (specially dyed), Minshall warmed to his theme, his voice booming in well-sculpted Trinified periods. "People ask me what does Red mean? I tell them: what does rain mean? What matters is what does it mean to you. I don’t design Carnival costumes, I give people a means to release their energy (darling)."

Can’t wait.

David Rudder, who plays the music for Minshall’s mas band, uh-huh’s emphatically. "This is one time people get to do they thing, you know, not somebody else thing."

Red’s HQ is a warehouse with 'RED' painted on the outside. Within, thirty-foot-high piles of red fabric tumble down from the roof, heaps of red umbrellas litter the floor, battalions of red lances lean against walls, while scores of red-eyed workers stitch and scrub and staple endless pieces of red plastic together. The beautiful Dominique, one of the organizers, glides purposefully among all the confusion, telling me that only two of the band’s fifteen sections are still open - Five and Prologue. Five involves wearing a giant flared insect-like headpiece, and Prologue means being either 'Flagwoman' or 'Man of Steel.' I'm definitely too masculine for the former and probably not enough for the latter, but I'm not sure about turning into a preying mantis for the day, so I opt for Man of Steel - a sort of Kaiser Wilhelm helmet with a two-foot spike out of the top and a pair of giant plastic chaps. Not forgetting the centerpiece: a gleaming codpiece of splendid proportions. A space cowboy, a Flash Gordon charioteer crossed with the Kaiser’s private guard wearing a Tibetan stupa on my head and cabaret gear down below. All in scarlet. Great.

Next I have to go to another office to pay up for my costume, then to a third to collect it. Dominique scribbles down directions for me and whisks herself back into the fray.

Carnival is close now, very close. You can feel it. In downtown Port of Spain, stray fragments of fetes, of mas bands, scurry about like birds before a storm. Some of the shops have boarded up their windows. Others have set up makeshift counters in their doorways from which to sell mountains of boxes of beer. There is barely any traffic. In a yard a rasta wearing a big pink hat has backed his truck to the street, and is slowly peeling his way through a small hill of oranges. On Independence Square (now Brian Lara Promenade), a flock of kids on giant stilts cling to a forest of steel flagpoles, their long white linen trousers billowing in the wind. One boy sits on the ground waiting while a man hammers at the base of his stilts, like a horse being shod. An icecream vendor tries his luck, slowing pedalling back and forth and tinkling his row of little bells. But the kids are too high up, or else too excited by their place up in the breeze, and by their transfigurement into white giants, to pay him any attention.

Tonight Radman’s Transport Yard will know no sleep. The trucks will all be serviced long into the night, their cabs tipped up over their engines while mechanics stoop in with lamps.

It’s easy to get weepy or exalted when talking about Carnival. But it is a kind of master-work, an assemblage of many parts that like a gothic cathedral with its thousands of separate artisans rises up as a single expression. There are people who will never miss a Carnival here. Every year they drop everything to come. Why? It’s not the loucheness, the bacchanalia, but the beauty that gets them - Carnival is not just an orgy, but an aesthetic orgy, an orgy of loveliness, human, musical, sartorial, whatever. Like some great novel, it is full of details any one of which possesses its own story, its own world, yet each of which is also instinct with the meaning of the whole.

Maybe it’s not too much to say that Carnival retains its medieval roots. Minshall talks about playing mas -- in our cathedral open to the sky -- namely the street - as if playing mas were a form of worship. Can it possibly live up to such praise?

Carnival operates with the crafty precision of a grand inquisitor. Just in case you thought you would in any way prepare yourself for the two-day marathon, Sunday night, the night before the first day, is ripped apart by the ceremony of J’Ouvert (jour ouvert), the official opening.

J’Ouvert is Carnival Unplugged. Instead of costumes, mud is the order of the day. At all-night parties people splash and smear one another with it, then troop off in the company of steel bands, wheeling the gleaming carts by hand, into downtown. By four A.M. the narrow streets are completely snarled with mud and steel. At a corner where four music trucks are converging, people mill about gently lolling to the mingled beats while a traffic policeman standing in the middle strokes his cane helplessly.

This is just the start. A guy in a bird mask clutches a biscuit tin of mud behind his back while a skeleton leads him along by a neck leash. A man in an enormous codpiece and Damart thermal underwear dances in front of the 'Ivory and Ebony' steel band. A gentleman in a gold head band strides down the street clutching a bottle of rum in both hands, passing a rasta selling peanuts out of a sack right there in the middle of the road.

By six o’clock, when the sun comes up, the pavements are wet with pale tropical mud. The mud’s clean chalky smell hangs in the air. What do people do for toilets? Lines of urine snake to the gutters. A youth lies in his own vomit, a gold masquerade crown discarded beside him. The forlorn-looking 'Original Modernaires' traipse into town, dragging a bathtub of mud, about three hours late. Their J’Ouvert party was obviously a success. A lone sound truck far up Tragarete Road ricochets over the cemetery, and a man with a huge handlebar moustache (real), a yellow waistcoat and hugely oversized polka-dot shorts says, "We gotta figure out where we’re going." His companions, nonplussed by the mix of excitement and ease in the air, are flecked with mud and paint. Despite all the noise and confusion of crowds, the atmosphere is friendly, easy.

I too have the feeling that I have somehow missed the main event. But there is no main event. The main event is getting drunk and playing with mud in public.

"Very cold here, very cold here," calls a man in a floppy hat and raincoat, wheeling along a supermarket trolley full of beer.

I watch a man set fire to a sneaker, set it down in the gutter, then strut away crowing, slapping his thighs in laughter.

This is the aftermath of J’Ouvert, a quiet drift of people outward from town. If you stop, the shadows stream past you in their own spell of silence.

An old woman in a long green dress stares stock still down the street, the morning sun flaring on her face. I can feel cool dye and mud spattered on my legs. It’s all rather confusing. Just what exactly is going on?

Carnival Monday doesn’t get going till the afternoon, and it never reaches the intensity of Tuesday, Mardi Gras, the main day, the final cataclysm of the whole season.

Minshall instructs the mas band to wear white - anything white. Only tomorrow will the real costumes be paraded before the Carnival judges and the world.

Under the tropical sun the day makes more sense than the morning. We - Red (though White for now, and not at full complement) - pace along the streets beside the various sound trucks that have been hired for our benefit. It’s a stirring, lovely sight, especially with the legendary Calypsonian David Rudder singing over our heads. But it’s nothing on the next day.

It’s only now, Mardi Gras morning, the main day, the final cataclysm of the whole season, that I pull everything out of my bag of tricks and try to get to grips with my baffling costume. The giant red codpiece I can figure out. The scintillating red tights too (known officially as “shimmery”). Even the giant three-foot wide scarlet chaps are comprehensible - sort of. But the caboodle of red cable, glistening epaulettes and elastic that is supposed to somehow clothe my chest is beyond me. It takes the statuesque Dominique, shimmering in red satin (hands-free walkie-talkie strapped to her ears), to sort me out. Finally I can don my red stupa.

We congregate on an empty street at the edge of town. There’s exhilaration in the air, something like you feel at the top of a ski slope where everyone is buckling up their boots. A windy sunny morning, the whole scene struck with a fierce light. More and more red people appear. Beside open cars people pull on their outfits, blazing under the sun. There’s a seriousness in the air too, a sense of awe before the day ahead. Three men on twelve-foot stilts stalk about, dressed in endless red trousers. Flash Gordon roach men with scarlet backpacks and masses of red cable appear; ladies in scarlet Shango robes with great rolls of red dreadlocks spilling from their headdresses; a guy in red shades and red bikini, waving around a red umbrella.

We mill about like an army waiting for the order to march. Coca-Cola, attracted by all the Red, are shooting us for a commercial. Several Coca-Cola trucks have been driven in. By nine A.M. I am dying of thirst and we haven't begun to move. Coca-Cola everywhere but not a drop to drink.

Then the evil-looking and still more evil-sounding Chinese Laundry Industry music truck rounds the corner, booming menacingly. "All right, Minshall People," a voice detonates. "We go play mas." The truck smothers the pretty percussion of the Laventille Riddum Section, on another truck, whose beat has been bouncing and drifting along like a babbling brook, something to cool and fortify the hot soul of a Carnival reveller.

Three thousand people clad head to toe and beyond in dazzling scarlet. Somehow, with no booming order, we all begin to move. Chip, chip, you hear the footsteps, whenever the music goes quiet. A battalion in sienna, a phalanx of alizarin - Downtown watch out, we’re on our way. A red riddum army on the move. Chip, chip. Over our heads the flags and streamers of battle flutter in the wind. Snake-kites with long tails streak and swoop like flaming spermatozoa. Crowds begin to fill the sidewalks, gawping at the spectacle that is us. A river of blood. Yes, quite simply, the Red Army. The Really Red Army.

So who plays mas? Who are we Men of Steel? Mostly middle-aged solid-looking men of African descent whom you might expect to find behind the desk in an insurance corporation, who silently, stolidly work their methodical ways through bottles of rum and whisky over the course of the day. One even has a special black pouch attached to his belt for his Black Label, and a special glass he periodically conjures from his person. They dance heavily, sturdily, but with a certain lilt to their step. Men of Sprung Steel, perhaps.

Noon, and all the shadows are gone. Nothing but little pools beneath the masqueraders’ feet. Only the flags’ shadows still occasionally billow out on the street, then shrink again into single lines when the wind dies.

We turn a corner onto an industrial wasteland of gutted city blocks. It all takes a strange turn. A new intensity is in the air. The sight of water gushing from a broken pipe down the gutter is oddly lovely. I can see smoke drifting over the hill at the end of the street: the whole city is on fire... But fire is a tired metaphor. How about IV? The constant intravenous flow of rhythm into the blood of the population, keeping them alive.

On Independence Square the crowds are dense. It’s odd to be watched like this, as you walk and dance and prance. Everywhere people stand watching us: a policewoman with a black ledger in her lap, guys with their arms looped through an iron grate, boys sitting on top of a wall, people in balconies, a small crowd on the upstairs verandah of Hung Chow’s Laundry.

There are four judging points along the eight-mile route, the last and main one being the Savannah Grandstand. Before the first, the walkie-talkie’d crew hold us back. A gang of red monks runs to fetch their lances from David Rudder’s music truck, where they had been storing them. "Get in yuh sections! Get in yuh sections!" raps the vocalist. Section by section we are released, to the ethereal strains of Rudder’s new hit, "Hi Mas" (a pun that has set ecclesiastical tongues wagging). We sail through the shadows of trees like a platoon of some rare bird, coming in wave after wave.

I take off my hat in the lull after the judges. It’s like opening up a hot tin roof. I had no idea how hot I was.

Along the way we invade a KFC for lunch, a conflagration of extras from some sci-fi disaster movie mingling with the regulars at the plastic tables. At least we’re all plastic too. You have never seen so much red plastic in one place. KFC should be shooting a commercial too.

The afternoon is long and dusty. I learnt later that a band ahead of us, 'Poison,' staged a sit-in on the Queen’s Park grandstand, holding up the whole proceedings for two hours. We spread out in a corner of the Savannah. It’s like a big dusty funfair here, without the rides and surrounded by clattering boom boxes the size of houses - like being caught in the middle of an artillery range, a battlefield, an Amazonian thunderstorm.

Across the park a band crackles like a bush fire. I realize it’s the Blue Ventures truck, immobilized in the crowd. I press my way over, waving up at the laconic Bobby Kwan, a man of few words, and the friendly-faced Bunny, his moustache slightly grizzled by the intervening years, who pulls back his sax mouthpiece to send me a huge grin. But there’s no time for chat. The music don't stop, man.

Among all the other masqueraders waiting their turn to get on stage the Minshall crew have an unmistakable gravity, a ceremoniousness, almost, dare I say it, a touch of the sacred. As if we were a band of Star Trek monks landed on the wrong planet, along with a cohort of red ladies with flaming mitres and angel wings. But the most winning costume of all, if you have the body for it, is a g-string and a full can of glitter spray. You can leave your hat on, baby.

Finally night falls, the dust enflamed by lights. The hour arrives. "Here look," a voice booms from one of our music trucks. "We wait so long. We can't wait so long and then look sloppy. So right now we gonna sectionize." It’s a good idea, this judging game. It gives the day a structure, an architecture, so you never lack a sense of purpose. You never stop to think: what the hell are we all doing?

In the press of night, on the ramp leading up to the floodlit stadium, my boyhood training in the art of tying shoelaces comes in handy. By feel I can tie up the repeatedly self-untying laces of my chaps. A spare parts truck has appeared, in case anyone needs to refit a tired costume.

Through the red mist of Flagwomen’s flags I can just make out the solitary figure of David Rudder in the stadium lights, robed in red, a high priest exhorting the entire stadium to "Give praise, give praise, children." Exhorting, in fact, the entire island, all the races, and by extension all humanity: celebrate, give thanks, and tens of thousands join in his colossal "Amen."

My heart is in my throat. The crew beckons us onto the stage, into the arc lights...

Midnight. Ash Wednesday. The first minutes of Lent. The streets are already being swept. By morning the town will look as if nothing monumental has just hit it. I can hear, or think I can, Rudder’s chorus "Give praise, give praise," being sung endlessly in some distant church.

Was it just a massive party? It seems more. Standing on the edge of the stage behind the Moko Jumbie stiltmen huddled shoulder to shoulder while Rudder sang his calypso hymn, watching Flagwomen being released into the lights while we waited for our turn, the crew wining as they beckoned us out into the party, the jam, the wine, telling us to go play we mas, then setting forth into the light, and looking back at the sight of all the banners and streamers of the whole red band pouring on, a great column of meaning, a tide of red, of life, of affirmation - although Red was just one of thirty bands, it seemed the very point of Carnival. Celebrate? Yes, but I wasn’t prepared for how moving it would be. There was surely something epic in the battalion of revellers topped by the flight of kites and flags, even something tragic. An army committed to transcending themselves, if only for as long as they are assembled, if only for a day.

There were no races tonight. Only a red race.

Peter Minshall says: "We don't worry if we win the Carnival contest or not, that’s small stuff." What’s the big stuff? Barcelona Olympics? Coca-Cola? Or something else, something words can only intimate, something with the tolerance and wisdom, as well as severity, of a masterpiece? Or something Bigger Still? After all, what better way could there be to enter Lent than by excessing in excess until you come face to face with the instigator of Lent Himself?