Angel Falls drops 979 metres off the edge of a flat-topped mountain in the rainforest of southeastern Venezuela, 807 of them in one unbroken plunge, and most of it never lands as water. The column breaks up hundreds of metres before the ground, so what reaches the bottom is cold drifting cloud rather than a torrent. The mountain matters as much as the fall. Auyán-tepui is one of the tepuis of the Guiana Highlands, tabletop plateaus of sandstone around two billion years old. They have stood apart so long that many summits grew their own plants and animals, found on one plateau and nowhere else. The Pemón, whose land this is, kept away from the top of Auyán-tepui: the name means House of the Devil, and they held it home to dangerous spirits.
No road comes near. Every visit starts with a flight into Canaima, then hours upstream in a curiara, the long motorised dugout Pemón boatmen steer, through a forest gorge past pink sand banks and side waterfalls. You sleep in a hammock in an open-sided shelter below the fall, with the sound of it carrying through the dark. In the morning a steep, root-tangled path climbs to the pool at the foot of the drop. A clearing on the way gives you the whole height, and only a bird crossing the water tells you how big it is. At the pool the wind coats you in spray blown off the face, and on a hot day people swim in it. Cloud caps the tepui most of the time, and the full column often shows only just after dawn. The camp is placed for that hour. Light planes bank along the wall at the height of the lip, where the water launches into space. Jimmie Angel landed on the summit looking for gold, could not take off again and walked out over eleven days; the plane stayed up there for thirty-three years, until a helicopter lifted it off.