Canaima is a park of mountains with their tops cut off, and no road reaches any of it. More than a hundred sandstone tables stand out of the rainforest of southeastern Venezuela, walls running up to a kilometre, what the rivers left of a plateau nearly two billion years old. Angel Falls drops off the rim of the largest of them. You fly in to Canaima village, and after that everything moves on water. The lagoon there is stained wine-red by tannins out of the forest, and the beaches are pink sand. You cross it in a curiara, the dugout the Pemón hollow from a single trunk and still use to get anywhere. A rock ledge runs behind Salto El Sapo, one of the falls pouring into the lagoon, and you walk its length with the water a roaring wall at your shoulder. You come out soaked. From about June to November the rains lift the rivers enough for the boats, the only stretch of the year the dugouts go up Devil's Canyon to the foot of the falls.
The mountain they come off is Auyán-tepui, the Devil's House in Pemón. The plateau was held to be home to the mawari, the restless dead, and hunters skirted it rather than climb it. The summits keep to themselves in a plainer way too. Sealed off on their own cliffs, the tepui summits work like islands: a plant that appears on one is often found on that mountain and no other, and on some tepuis a quarter of the species are like that. Rain falls on those tops almost daily and washes the bare rock of anything a root can use. A number of the plants took up eating instead — sundews, and the pitchers of the genus Heliamphora, which drown insects in water they hold on the stone. A light plane gives the only wide view of it, banking along the flank of Auyán-tepui with tables running away on every side. Of those summits, a few have never been reached from below at all.