Keeping time in Guyana; public clocks and bells in this nation are both guardians of tradition and chimes of change.

• Author: Shayt, David H.

Centuries of public time stand watch over the cities of Europe, Asia, and much of the Western Hemisphere. Yet today, with wristwatches everywhere, towering time-keepers probably seem more important as familiar silhouettes on the local skyline. The hand-rung church bell endures as one of the most resilient symbols of this long heritage.

However, in many of Guyana's markets, public buildings, churches, and private businesses, there is a glorious profusion of bell-striking tower clocks that are not regarded as fossils of another age. Public time is alive and well, both as architectural embellishment and as a bond with the challenges faced in the nation's past.

New public clocks have arisen in recent years in Georgetown, the capital, while many of the older clocks with their large bronze bells are beating with life once again. Beginning in 1990, the old clocks once again became capable of keeping accurate time. With help from the Smithsonian Institution, some Guyanese city dwellers are discovering to their delight that "antique" mechanical systems are capable of working as intended, simply with the application of some oil, cleaning solvents, and arm and back muscles to wind a crank once a week. They have also come to appreciate that hand-wound pendulum-regulated mechanisms also keep on ticking through periods of uncertain electrical supply.

Old tower clocks at Sacred Heart Church on Georgetown's Main Street, the Public Hospital, the Muneshwer Building, and the city's three public markets are showing how efficiently the well-engineered traditional timekeeper of the past can behave: the silent dance of gear wheels, the so-familiar "tick-tock" of the escapement mechanism, the slow arc of the large, heavy pendulum bob swinging hypnotically in its pit below, and the massive driving weights, looking for all the world like airborne anchors, suspended in the gloom far beneath.

One of Guyana's newest clocks presides over the main road to Cheddi Jagan International Airport, south of Georgetown. Two illuminated dials, each nine feet in diameter, provide time from Banks Brewery to surrounding neighborhoods, while giving the 1950s building a new, more friend y face. Emphatically modern, this clock was manufactured in Switzerland in 1994 and is governed by a quartz regulator housed downstairs in the brewery's research laboratory.

Another electrically driven clock shows precise time at the famous Bourda cricket ground in central Georgetown. This battery-powered mechanism of the 1970s gives an impulse every second to its pendulum, which advances the clock's hands in their commanding position above the cricket pitch.

The story of Guyana's clocks and bells, however, is told primarily by the older towers, such as the great 1881 iron clock tower of Stabroek Market, at the heart of the capital's commercial life, and the four-dialed wood steeple of a New Amsterdam church, some sixty miles down the Atlantic coast. The clocks within these towers are time capsules containing several kinds of knowledge: the skills of the tower-clock maker (a trade virtually extinct), the prosperity and intentions of the clock's purchaser, and the daily routines of the thousands who relied upon these...