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National Geographic : 1989 May
Contents
land: "The common soldier. . . . shal find there more rich and bew tifull cities, more temples adorned with golden Images ... then ei ther Cortez found in Mexico, or Pazzaro in Peru. . . . Guianais a Countrey that hath yet her Maydenhead, neuer sackt, turned, nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not beene tome. ... " Raleigh went on to tell of a crystal mountain covered with dia monds and other precious stones where waters gush down. The mountain, Raleigh wrote, gave the impression of a "white Church towre. .... There falleth ouer it a mightie riuer which toucheth no parte of the side of the mountaine, but . . falleth to the grounde with a terrible noyse and clamor, as if 1000 great belles were knockt one against another. ... but what it hath I knowe not, neyther durst he or any of his men ascende to the toppe of the saide mountaine, those people adioyning beeing his enemies (as they were) and the i way to it so impassible." Raleigh obviously had seen a tepui, and his description is re garded as the earliest written ref erence to one. M' Y THOUGHTS are interrupted by Jose Miguel calling me from above: "Uwe, hurry up, we really have to reach the plateau before nightfall." How right he is. Darkness quick ly creeps up the rock wall. We cannot spend the night on the rain-soaked cliff. Just in the very last shimmer of the day, as dis tant sheet lightning becomes brighter than the daylight, we reach the surface of the plateau at about 8,500 feet. What I can distinguish of the landscape in the last daylight seems to have come out of a nightmare. Boulders and pinna cles in every size and form are piled one on top of the other. Stormy winds whip ice-cold rain into our faces. In the light of our lamps we stumble a few hundred yards farther. There is no thought of putting up a tent. There is not one square yard of flat surface. What is not naked, slippery rock is bottomless morass. Like wet dogs Jose Miguel and I crawl under the stony roof of a mushroom-shaped rock ledge and get into our sleeping bags. The Indians go off to another shelter. A thunderstorm of primeval pow er breaks over us. The rolls of thunder last over a full minute each. Lightning follows lightning, crashing into the rocks, accompanied "All theirfestive songs have Roraima for subject matter," German botanist Richard Schomburgk wrote of the Pem6n Indians,who in 1842 helped him climb the tepui whose name means "singing of waterfalls." It towers at far right in this view from his savanna camp (left), a per spective confirmed by the au thor (top left). Schomburgk and his brother Robert-who first saw the tepui in 1838 failed to reach the summit, but they excited Europe with specimens from a "botanical El Dorado," such as one from a tree in the tepui's baseforest (above). BY CHARLESBENTLEY,FROMFIELDSKETCHESBY RICHARDSCHOMBURGK(LEFT); WEINMANNIA BALBISIANUS VAR. RORAIMENSIS, BY J. LIEPE, COURTESYBOTANISCHESMUSEUM, BERLIN(ABOVE) Venezuela's Islands in Time 537
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