The flight was short but intense.  Twenty minutes out, a broken wall of mountains, the Merumes, reared in front of us.  They were shaped like giant boxes, or even anvils, one at least I’ll swear was broader at its summit than its base.  Sheer sandstone walls leapt clear of unbroken rain-forest; huge cumuli hung over them, and, just as you realized you were flying through the range well below the level of the summits, these clouds embraced the plane, blotting out everything in fleecy whiteness.

     After a few bumpy white-knuckle minutes, the DC3 abruptly emerged into dazzling sunlight.  Ahead, another yet-higher range of flat-tops, the Pakaraimas, this time; another range of yet-vaster, cauliflower-headed, ominously-shadowing clouds.  But before them, a broad green sunny valley silvered by two rivers that met to form a broader one.  No sight of habitation, no sign of an airstrip.  The plane banked, descending steeply towards the unbroken canopy.  Suddenly. as you braced for impact, it banked again, and a narrow strip of cracked cement sprang magically into existence right under the plane’s wheels.  A couple of bounces and there you were.

     Kamerang was just that, an airstrip, with strings of white-painted wooden bungalows either side of it.  We were lodged in one of them, a spartan affair grandiloquently known as the Government Rest House.  At dusk, the clouds lifted.  Bleakley beckoned to us, we followed him out to the veranda, and there, thirty or forty miles away, at the end of a long avenue of river,  rose Roraima, the fabled tableland where Conan Doyle dreamed of surviving dinosaurs–Roraima, mute symbol of all that remained mysterious in the world.

    We went upriver in a tent-boat, a big wooden canoe powered by an Archimedes outboard, with a wood canopy at the stern.  Every now and then we passed a woodskin, a canoe made by stripping the bark from an entire tree-trunk, with about an inch and a half of freeboard and a couple of Amerindians paddling.  The boatman cut the Archimedes so our wake would not swamp them.  It was hot and still.  Nothing moved on the banks. Occasionally a big kingfisher took off and flew from bank to bank, waited until we had almost reached him, then took off again.

     I wasn’t used to sleeping in a hammock.  I kept waking, once or twice to the thunder of a shower on the drum-tight tarp, mostly because of unaccustomed aches in muscles and bones.  Then it was grey dawn, everything still as death, thick mist over the water.  The sun exploded, swallowing the mist in minutes.  Now we could see a thousand-foot escarpment towering above the landing.

      The crew were Akawaios, members of an Arawak tribe.  They had been employed as bearers–droghers, the Dutch called them, and the name stuck--by Europeans ever since Europeans began to penetrate the interior.  In their warishis, woven frames of saplings and bark that they hoisted onto their shoulders, they could carry up to two hundred pounds.  Two of them once raced one another, fully laden, over a nine-mile course.  The winner dropped dead at the finish-line–or so the story claimed.

     The trail zigzagged up the face of the escarpment.  It was like the opening scene of Aguirre, Wrath of God played in reverse, only with pudding-basin-coiffed Amerindians in place of helmeted Spaniards.   Even with their loads they outpaced us as we walked empty-handed, as befitted members of a master race, except for the Young Agronomist who was burdened with a soil auger.  He was supposed to take soil samples with the auger, a five-foot metal corkscrew, to see whether the upland soils were suitable for cultivation.

     Above the escarpment lay gently rolling country, montane forest with little underbrush, not all that different from an English beechwood, varied by patches of savanna and occasional rocky outcrops.  Sure enough, in each little valley were streams to ford, but our feet dried out quickly thanks to our canvas-topped yachting boots.  Nowhere in the whole landscape was there the least sign that humans existed or had ever existed.  Even the trail we followed was so faint it could have been a game trail.  In the stifling heat of noon the silence was all but absolute; just once in a while, a bell-bird would give its single, limpid, echoing note.

     We had three or four days of this before we reached Ayenganna.

     Later in the first day we noticed that the Swiss doctor wasn’t with us. Shortly thereafter we heard a pistol shot.

     None of us was armed, except for the Swiss doctor and the lead drogher.  The lead drogher carried a double-barreled twelve-bore; this was simply to shoot game and augment our food supply.  The Swiss doctor had a Colt .22 automatic, or bluenose, as its aficionados called it--a pussy gun, to the more critical.  I’ve no idea why he carried it. probably just from some boy’s-magazine idea about how macho explorers should behave.  One was unlikely to meet either big fierce animals or bad guys.  What they call in the Caribbean a snake pistol, i.e. a sawn-off, might have come in handy a couple of times, but unless you’re James Bond don’t try shooting snakes with a small handgun.

     Jerry and I volunteered to sort things out.  We found the good doctor just off the trail in a shallow rocky basin, facing off against a large ant-eater.  Apparently he’d shot at it and missed, the ant-eater ran and he followed, and now he had it cornered. The ant-eater was swishing its long bushy tail and trying to look ferocious, but of course they’re totally harmless.  That didn’t stop the doctor, who, even as we shouted at him to hold his fire, put a bullet into it.

     The ant-eater, wounded, lolloped painfully off.  We told the doctor what an asshole he was, and to at least go in and finish it.  But we couldn’t find it.  Maybe it survived, maybe it died a lingering death.  You can’t just totally ignore someone when you’re out in the bush with them for a couple of weeks, but the Swiss doctor became a non-person to me from then on.

      So did the Young Agronomist.