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given up hope. Everyone seemed to consider climbing the outer tepuis to be a ridiculous idea anyway, especially for this rather overweight traveler who sweated like an ox at the first thwack of morning sun.
    Then I met Charles Arkright Gurnley.
    So often in adventures of this kind, something comes up that transforms an apparently hopeless situation. You need to keep your mind focused on your goal and to sidestep setbacks with agile optimism.
    I was at the local airstrip, a hop, skip, and a bump down the rutted track from my cabin, exploring the possibilities of leaving Canaima early. There seemed little point hanging around only to be told “no” all the time. A few yards from the airline office was a ramshackle place that doubled as a café and souvenir stall selling hammocks, masks, blow pipes, all authentic stuff produced by the local Pémon Indians.
    Mr. Gurnley suddenly appeared, a gaunt figure, tall and jangle-limbed, with thick-rimmed spectacles, neatly trimmed moustache and beard, balding head and jungle-stained shorts and shirt. He was hardly a Hemingway but there was something in the way he carried himself, erect, like one of those Buckingham Palace guardsmen, and with the same distant focus in his dark brown eyes.
    We almost bumped into each other. I apologized and his focus shifted to the tip of my sun-scorched nose. He had a haughty, stiff-upper-lip glance, and my first impression was that of a Britisher, ex-public school (which in Brit-lingo means private fee-paying), almost a caricature of the type. His face was a smother of incised lines, and I couldn’t tell if he was scowling or in pain, the kind of look you get when you take a bite out of a lemon (although why would anyone ever take a bite out of a lemon?). He reminded me of my old school headmaster—acetic, furrowed, stoic.
    “My fault, my fault,” he murmured, and then he smiled, and his smile was remarkably angelic, turning all the furrows into instant laugh lines. I liked him immediately.
    “I’m trying to find a bit of shade,” I said rather uselessly.
    “Yes—it’s hot today. Bit much for this early.”
    “You’re British?”
    “Yes. You are too?”
    “Yes.”
    “Like it here?”
    “I’d like it a lot better if I could find a way up into the tepuis.”
    “Beyond Auyantepuy?” he asked with an incredulous glint.
    “Yes.”
    “They’re difficult to climb y’know.”
    “You’ve been?”
    “Oh yes. Once or twice.”
    “How do I get up them?”
    He laughed and exposed a keyboard of ivory-white teeth.
    “You ask me.”
    “You?”
    “Well you could ask the boys here, but they won’t be very interested.”
    “Why?”
    “They don’t like climbing.”
    “Why?” (I was feeling like a kid with his dad.)
    “They don’t trust it very much.”
    “Frightened?”
    “Yes.”
    “Of what?”
    “Aha!” Another toothy grin. “It’s best you don’t know.”
    “Seriously?”
    “Oh it’s all a lot of guff.” But the way he spoke made me feel I wasn’t getting to the whole truth.
    “So how do I get up?”
    He stopped smiling and looked at me, a little quizzically, with his head on one side.
    “It’s very difficult.”
    “You’ve told me that.”
    “Yes. Yes, I did.” More piercing looks.
    “So?”
    “You really want to go?”
    “Yes.”
    “Why?”
    (You’re always tempted to give the standard Edmund Hillary “because it’s there” response, but I didn’t.)
    “Because I’ve never seen anywhere in the world like this place, and I don’t want to leave.”
    “Yes, it can affect you that way.”
    “Do many people climb?”
    “No.”
    “Can I do it?”
    “Perhaps.”
    “So how do I go about doing it?”
    Another long pause.
    “Meet me here tomorrow. About nine A.M. , after breakfast. I’ll see what I can do.”
    “All right?”
    “Right then.”
    And he was off, like a giraffe, stiff-backed and long-necked, with a final “Say nine-thirty! That’ll be better for me.”
    “Okay.”
    A quick smile and