The Heliamphora pitcher plant, its glistening pitchers upright in the rain, is writing the history of plant evolution in a nutrient-poor isolated environment — a history of the solutions that natural selection can find when the constraints are extreme and the time is sufficient.

All of this is happening simultaneously, on the same summit, on the same dark rock, in the same rain.

The deep time lesson that Roraima teaches is not that ancient things persist unchanged — they do not.

It is that time is the medium in which the natural world operates, and that given sufficient time, the processes of erosion and evolution and ecology can produce results that look, to a human observer, like impossibility.

Roraima is not impossible.