The landscape below is an expanse of savanna and forest, crossed by rivers, interrupted by clusters of trees that mark wetland margins and stream banks.

The scale of the view is difficult to convey.

The Gran Sabana is vast, and the tepuis rise from it at distances that make them look like monuments at the edges of a plain.

From the summit of Roraima, you are looking down at a landscape that is simultaneously familiar — it is South America, it is tropical, it is inhabited — and profoundly unfamiliar, because the perspective from a two-billion-year-old sandstone plateau 2,800 meters above sea level reorganizes the visual information of the surrounding world in ways that do not correspond to any normal human experience.

The clouds that so often wrap the summit are not merely a weather phenomenon.