The summit plateau of Roraima is approximately 31 square kilometers in area — a roughly triangular shape defined by the three countries whose borders meet at the mountain’s southern tip.

Venezuela occupies most of the summit, with Guyana and Brazil each claiming a portion.

To describe the summit landscape requires abandoning the expectation that a mountaintop will look like a mountaintop.

The summit of Roraima does not look like any other high-altitude landscape in South America.

It does not look like the icy peaks of the Andes, or the rocky plateaus of the high cordillera, or even like most other tepui summits, though it shares family resemblances with some of them.

What it looks like, to many visitors, is something that belongs to an entirely different category of place — something that feels extraterrestrial, or that feels like a landscape from a geography that has no name.