THE STORY

The village of Teruta was abandoned in the 1920s but even now, as I found when I retraced the early explorers route, it is possible to see circular bare patches of earth where the huts once stood. It was from here that the explorers would have scrutinized the cliffs of Roraima hoping to find a possible ascent route, and perhaps dreaming of the Victorian fantasy of a prehistoric "Lost World", complete with dinosaurs and pterodactyls.

The Ledge of Roraima, from a sketch by Im Thurn, 1885	The Ledge of RORAIMA, 2000

Most of the explorers who made it this far, had observed a sloping ledge that seemed to offer a possible path for an ascent, except that halfway up it had been eaten away by a waterfall and was therefore pronounced impassable. It must have been disheartening, for the only other option open to them was a long and difficult circumnavigation of the mountain in search of other possibilities. During their long approach to the mountain, many of them would have seen the eastern flank of Roraima, and noticed that the cliffs there seemed just as impregnable. One explorer wrote: "the summit of Roraima seems inaccessible, except perhaps by means of a balloon". Most of the expeditions, having travelled so far and by now short of food, gave up and made plans to return home. One very enterprising visitor to the area, who was not so obsessed with trying to reach the summit, was ornithologist Henry Whitely. A remarkable man, he spent several months, working alone, collecting birds in the vicinity of Roraima in 1883. One of his principal aims was to search for a species of bird known only from one specimen and said to come from the slopes of Roraima at around 6,000 feet, so he therefore determined to climb to the base of Roraima's perpendicular wall. At that time there was a considerable belt of forest on the flanks of the mountain, between the base of the cliff and the gently rolling savannah further down. Much of this forest was later destroyed by a fire in 1925 started by the local Pemon people, but for Whitely, it was a formidable barrier: "It was," he wrote, "the densest underwood I have ever passed through." The slope which became ever steeper, is formed from rocks breaking away from the sides of the mountain, covered in trees and tangled undergrowth. Whitely did, however, reach the cliff but not the base of the ledge, which he had hoped to examine in more detail. In his opinion, from what he could see from his highest observation point, the break half way up the ledge might perhaps be crossed by using ropes, but it did not look to be easy. He also felt that a successful expedition should be prepared to stay on the summit for a long time, in order to study its animal and plant life in sufficient detail to make all the effort worthwhile.