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untold Indian multitudes, basking in unbelievable riches, fathering whole tribes of light-skinned descendants….
    More recent reports however have suggested his rather messy and inauspicious demise at the hands of irate Indian skull bashers who resented the man’s casual intrusion into their territory, certainly a more realistic assumption and not at all the stuff of which legends are made.
    My only hope was that skull bashing was a thing of the past. I had no desire to make this elusive lost world of the Venezuelan tepuis a lost world for me.
     
     
    You could hear the excitement, even in the pilot’s voice over the intercom: “The cloud cover is lifting. We should be able to see the mountains today. I shall be flying as close as possible to the Angel Falls. Please fasten your seat belts. It will be bumpy.”
    That was nothing new. The whole journey had been bumpy. Five hundred miles from Caracas in a small fifty-seat plane bouncing across the thermals thrown up by the dry red plains and brittle ridges below us. Then up through the clouds, into the blue, peering out of tiny windows, seeking signs of the tepuis.
    But he was right about the clouds. We descended through thinning haze, and down below was the jungle. Mile after mile after mile of green sponge in every direction, with occasional flashes of serpentine rivers and streams meandering through this eternity of green.
    Then the first tepui. A huge vertical shaft of dark strata cut by creamy clefts rising abruptly out of the jungle. Its profile seemed familiar at first. We edged closer to the towering rock face. A close encounter. Precisely that— Close Encounters . The Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, that mystical volcanic monolith replicated by Richard Dreyfus in charcoal sketches, then mashed potatoes, then enough wet clay to fill his living room. But not one. A dozen of them here and much larger than the Devil’s Tower, separated by scores of square miles of jungle, their flat barren tops, fractured and split, scraping the clouds; the last magnificent stumps of a vast plateau of sandstone and igneous rock, almost two billion years old.
    Once a part of the great land mass of Gondwana, the plateau was a notable feature of the earth even before South America and Africa were separated by massive tectonic plate movements over two hundred million years ago. Subsequent cracking of the high plateau led to its gradual disintegration by erosion into individual flat-topped tepuis. Rather like the buttes of Arizona’s Monument Valley transplanted into an Amazonian setting.
    “Angel Falls approaching on the right.”
    And there it was. Tumbling in lacy sprays off the summit of Auyantepuy, an uninterrupted drop of 3,212 feet, the tallest waterfall in the world, billowing in a crochet cascade, sheened by the afternoon sun.
    There were more falls. Smaller but no less impressive, spuming off the black cracked top of the tepui and disappearing in a hundred streams far below in the unbroken jungle. And beyond, the hazy silhouettes of other tepuis, stretching out across the green infinity into the 1,500-mile-wide Amazonian basin itself.
    Finally, after years of dreaming, I had arrived at the edge of Sir Arthur’s lost world.
     
     
    Base camp at Canaima was more than adequate. A cluster of chalets in a jungle clearing catering to the more adventurous tourists, anxious to catch a glimpse of tepui country and the roaring falls on the Carrao River. For most visitors this was the beginning and end of their journey, a lovely interlude of meals and cocktails on a shady terrace overlooking the falls, maybe a river excursion to the base of Angel Falls for the explorer types, and then back to the hectic hedonism of Caracas and the coastal resorts.
    For me it was just the beginning, or at least I thought it was, but having bored several guests with my plans to travel deep into tepui country, I found myself no closer to leaving after three days of negotiation with local guides.
    I had almost