Foot traffic destroys it easily, exposing the lighter rock beneath and taking years or decades to recolonize after disturbance.

This is one reason why off-trail walking on the summit is particularly damaging — the black crust that gives the summit much of its visual character is being removed wherever people walk, and it is recovering very slowly.

The visual effect of a field of black rock scattered with white quartz crystals and punctuated by the colorful forms of carnivorous plants and other endemic vegetation is one of the things that gives the Roraima summit its quality of being a landscape unlike anything familiar.

The black is biology — ancient, slow-growing biology — covering geology that is even more ancient.