Fortune smiles on the bold. Today we have a beautiful,
non-rainy day, so Luis and I intend to cover a lot of ground. This is a wild
landscape with lots of twists and turns among pillars of sandstone. It is not
quite The Wave in eastern Nevada, but the erosion of the laminated and
cross-bedded sandstone creates many fantastic wall shapes.
One of our special stops was at La Gran Grieta, which is an enormous, steep-sided canyon, where a
stream has cut nearly a hundred meters unto the horizontal sandstone sequence.
Toward the edge of the mesa the canyon ends in a deep “V”, out of which shoots
one of the many waterfalls that cascades off Roraima. A perfectly natural way
for erosion to behave, but the annoying fact is that these are Proterozoic
rocks with nothing covering them. Why then have they persisted for a thousand
million years? They are hard, but not so hard, so with this level of
precipitation they should have been denuded 975 million years ago.
Our next stop was La
Grieta del Guácharo, another narrow deep ravine, maybe 50 m deep, where a
flock of guacharo birds has established its abode. These are non-endemic large
brown birds (maybe the size of a small seagull), who spend their day lazing
around asleep on the sandstone ledges, and then come out at night, as a flock,
to feed. Since there are no small rodents up here, I presume they feed on
insects, but even those are pretty slim pickings up here.
Speaking of birds, we also have some non-endemic small
birds, who are themselves food for a few non-endemic red-tail hawks that fly
along the edge of the mesa but do not roost on it. Finally, there is a pretty
elusive white owl, who must have turned vegan or survives out of eating tiny
black frogs.
Several times we approached the edge of the tepui, to stare
at the edge of the world. A sea of clouds extended into infinity, with only the
tepuis rising above the clouds, as steep-sided islands in a ghostly
archipelago. Nearest is Kukenán tepui, which is perhaps 100 m shorter than
Roraima and much smaller in footprint, and in the far distance one can see a
couple more. A Pemón legend says that originally there was an enormous tree at
the location of Kukenán, and that this tree produced all known fruits and
vegetables. The Pemón lived happily picking up the fruits that fell off the
tree, and so did all other animals in the sabana. One day, however, two
brothers expressed their annoyance at always having to eat bruised fruit, so
they came up with the idea of cutting down the tree to pick up the high fruit.
They did, and as the giant tree started toppling down it turned into stone,
crashed against the ground to form the tepuis, and brought to an end the
prosperity of the Pemón.
We made a last foray in the afternoon, and were rewarded by
a brief period during which the clouds blew away, and we could look straight
down over the Gran Sabana, 1,800 m beneath us,
as if we were birds flying over the landscape. “Look, there is
Paraitepuy.” “Yes, and there is Kamaiwakén camp, where we spent the night.”
“And there is Base Camp … what the? … what are those tents doing there? … Rats!
There is an invasion of people coming our way!”
It had not occurred to me that anyone else might want to
come to Roraima, and so far we had not seen the least evidence that there were
other human beings alive within a 50 km radius. It was great while it lasted,
particularly since we are going back tomorrow and will limit our exposure to
passing other groups ‘like ships in the night’.
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