Roraima is not the only mountain of its kind.

It is, arguably, the most dramatic and most famous, but it belongs to a category — the tepuis of the Guiana Highlands — that is defined by the same basic geological logic.

Tepui is a Pemon word that can be translated roughly as “mountain of the gods” or “house of the gods,” though again, any translation collapses a term with specific cultural meaning into an approximation.

In scientific usage, “tepui” has been adopted as a technical term for the flat-topped, cliff-walled mountains of the Guiana Highlands that extend across southern Venezuela, western Guyana, northern Brazil, and the northeastern corner of Colombia.