Voltzberg is a bald granite dome 240 metres high standing out of the roadless rainforest of central Suriname, and nothing stripped it. Granite this hard sheds rain straight off its curve and peels away in shells, so soil never gets long enough to settle and hold. The only way in is by water. A korjaal, a long narrow dugout, carries you and the week's gear up the Coppename River to Raleigh Falls, where the current breaks white over granite ledges. The forest closes in on both banks. Then six kilometres of primary rainforest lie between the river and the rock: creeks crossed on fallen trunks, buttress roots you climb over rather than step across, fungi on every rotting branch. Nothing here has been logged or hunted, and the animals have not learned to be afraid of people.
The climb starts in the dark, because the dome is shadeless and turns into a hotplate later. The trees simply stop and coarse charcoal-grey granite takes over, steep enough in places to put you on your hands, with nothing to work with but the grip of your boots. From the top the canopy runs to every horizon, and the only landmarks are other domes breaking through it, while macaws and toucans cross below you leaving their roosts. There is no road, roof or clearing in any of it. The other reason for the walk is at the foot of the rock. From December to April orange male cocks-of-the-rock hold display grounds on the forest floor, each on a bare circle about a metre across. They bow and flare hardest at first light. Females watch from perches above, choose, mate and leave alone, nesting away from the lek in a cup of mud and fibre glued with saliva to a shaded rock face. What the bare rock leaves on the summit is a kind of savanna: mats of drought-adapted herbs and lichens rooted in cracks, with cacti among them, in the middle of one of the wettest forests on Earth.