The Mountain of Lost Silver: Roraima

The great tabletop mountain where Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana meet was, to the Pemon people, the stump of a mighty tree felled by a trickster god, and to Victorian Europe it was the “lost world” of Conan Doyle’s novel, a plateau where prehistoric life might survive. The truth is nearly as strange: a two-billion-year-old sandstone island in the sky, with its own carnivorous plants and species found nowhere else, and waterfalls that fall off the edge into cloud. You can trek up it.