Mt. Roraima

At that jungle-covered spot of northern South America, where Venezuela, British Guiana and Brazil touch each other angularly, is Mt. Roraima, famed among travelers and explorers. It is a huge wall of red rock that rises, like a ruddy tree trunk, 1,500 ft. sheer above the surrounding plateau and altogether some 8,500 ft. above sea level. It seems unscalable.

However, a party of explorers from the American Museum of Natural History, who were back in Manhattan last week pallid from malaria, recently reached the top by following a ledge* that ran thinly up Mt. Roraima from the Brazilian side. Atop Mt. Roraima they found themselves on a remarkably flat tableland, 12 miles square, something like the flat land of Arizona through which the Grand Canyon of the Colorado River cuts.

From flat Mt. Roraima the explorers--T. D. Carter, G. H. H. Tate and G. M. Tate (younger brother of G. H. H.)--leveled their binoculars across lower flat-topped mountains towards Brazil, British Guiana and Venezuela. They saw, through the frequent rain & mist, water dropping in a vertical fall 2,000 feet. They saw water flowing south down rills, brooks, creeks, rivers to the Amazon and thence eastward to the Atlantic; they saw dripping from jungle trees moisture that was to flow north through the muddy Orinoco and the cascading Essequibo rivers into the Caribbean.

Quaint birds, animals and reptiles moved about them--atop Mt. Roraima, and on the plateau below. Mr. Carter killed a jaguar as it was feeding on its kill, a colt. The elder Mr. Tate killed a poisonous bushmaster snake five feet long just after he had stepped across it in the dark. One of their 130 Arecuna Indian porters hacked with his machete at a 14-ft. anaconda until it was dead and ready for eating. (Anaconda flesh tastes something like chicken.) They snared birds, netted insects, disinterred ground plants, culled orchids from their treeholds, pounced on small beasts. Rare among their catches was a variety of the Thomas rat, second of its kind ever caught. (The first is in the British Museum.) They also trapped five strange mice with sharp noses, beady eyes and long claws, more a digger than a gnawer type of creature. Altogether in their bales, sacks, boxes and cages the explorers brought back to the American Museum of Natural History, and last week were sorting, 1,260 birds, 350 mammals, innumerable plants.

* Discovered first in 1884, but rarely trod since.