by Tim Cahill
Inevitably, the strange landscape of the Lost World had shaped some strange human beings. We expected to meet and hear tales of bush pilots and explorers, diamond miners, outlaws, and madmen. We also expected to get more than a little wet. Why did we want to do all this? The urge to climb Mount Roraima in the rainy season is simply inexplicable without reference to psychiatric literature—and the tales of adventure one reads in childhood. Some people have shivered through entire winters in Antarctica or sailed through menacing seas for the same reasons. The urge, I think now, has something to do with the desire to see just how truly rotten life can be.
The rainy season in the highlands is biblical in proportion. Great warm drops the size of half-dollars begin to fall in the river valleys. Then the sky rips open and solid sheets of water tear into the earth. The rivers rise hourly. Huge jungle trees, like half-submerged barges, float down toward the sea.
On the mountaintops, the rain falls cold, driven by howling winds. There, marshes are formed, and they puddle into rivulets that flow into big, strong-running rivers. These high, cold waters seek the warmth of the Orinoco, Venezuela’s great lowland river. They snake on through the broken, alien landscapes of the mountains, then erupt over the lip of some high vertical wall, falling one, two, three thousand feet. The most famous of these waterfalls, the highest waterfall in the world, Angel Falls, drops from a Lost World mountain called Auyán-tepui.
The story of the discovery of the falls has been told so many times, so many ways, that it qualifies as modern legend. Back in the early 1920s, the American bush pilot Jimmy Angel was sitting in a Panama City bar when an excited man approached him with tales of “rivers of gold” located … well, the man knew where they were located. Angel flew him south without instruments, and the man directed him with jerks of the thumb. They landed atop one of the table mountains, near a river, and from that river, in less than a week, the two men took more than sixty pounds of gold.
Angel devoted much of the rest of his life to a vain effort to find the river of gold again. On one of his sorties, in 1935, he flew his light plane up the Carrao River, which skirts the huge 8,000-foot-high, 250-square-mile mass of Auyán-tepui. Turning south, he followed the Churún River in a wide, deep canyon. When he was halfway to the head of the canyon, on the west side, Angel saw the immense free-falling cataract that bears his name.
Two years later, Angel added to his legend when he put his plane down on top of Auyán-tepui, near the river that feeds Angel Falls. As he was landing, the plane hit a soft spot, and its prop was buried in the mud. Angel walked eleven days through uncharted territory before he reached safety.
In 1949, Ruth Robertson, a remarkable woman who worked for the Daily Journal, the English-language newspaper of Caracas, organized an expedition to the base of the falls. It was a long and hazardous journey in those days, but when her group finally arrived, and when the surveyors had completed their work, there was no longer any question: at 3,212 feet, Angel Falls was the highest in the world.
These days, only thirty years later, a person with four or five hundred dollars can be boated to the falls in relative comfort. The trip takes anywhere from three to seven days, depending on the depth of the river and the number of shallows the boat has to be pulled over. The starting point is Canaima, a jungle resort on the Carrao River. The forest around Canaima more closely resembles the tropical paradise of legend than it does the Heart of Darkness. There, the Carrao roars over two impressive falls and pools up into a spectacular lagoon large enough for sailing or water-skiing. Pinkish white sand beaches fringe the lagoon, and the air is heavy with the scent of tropical flowers.
We chose to make the trip to the falls with “Jungle Rudy” Truffino, a famous guide who has been running such trips for twenty-five of his fifty-one years. Like the other guides, Rudy uses long dugout canoes equipped with forty-horsepower Johnson motors.
The first thing one notices out on the river is the color of the water. The Carrao and the Churún are not leaden, like the Orinoco or the Cuyuní. In the shallow spots, the water is the color of strong tea or good bourbon. In the deep pools and lagoons, it is silvery black, like the polished barrel of an expensive rifle. For some reason, those aquatic South American killers, piranhas, cannot abide these dark waters. Where the rivers are brown or black, it is generally safe to swim.
Jungle Rudy’s Angel Falls camp was a house he had built of river rocks and cement on the banks of the Churún. It was about an hours walk through the jungle to the base of the falls. We caught a few hours of sleep and rose at four the morning after our arrival. Thunder rumbled ceaselessly down the canyon, and lightning flashes froze us in cold, white, stroboscopic bursts as we dressed for the walk. With our miners headlamps glaring, we crossed the Churún and began trudging sleepily up the steep trail to the base of the falls. The jungle vines plucked at us like a small, insistent child, but we arrived at a lookout over the base just before sunrise.
The canyon wall faced due east. Miraculously, the day dawned blue and clear. The sun on the wall was a brilliant pink and sandy rose. The water fell like molten silver, shining in the sun, stark against the luminescent red rock.
About halfway down the wall, the waters separated into a fine mist; the mist was carried by the wind, and as the sun rose higher, rainbows danced at the mossy base of Angel Falls. There were two, three, sometimes four rainbows, and they fell with the mist and shifted in the morning breeze like flags in the wind. There was no sound, no roar of water in the mist at the base. It was eerily silent among the rainbows.
Later, clouds formed at the precipice and dropped near where the falls became mist. The clouds were the same color as the water. It seemed as if they had suffered some terrible wound, as if they were being drained of their life-forces. I saw why the Indians call this falls “the water that comes from the clouds.”
When the clouds parted, we dozed for a while, then found the first pool under the falls and swam for an hour before the inevitable rains. The sun was hot; the waters were deep and golden brown. I felt sanctified—overwhelmed by the spectacle and giddy with awe. It was as if I were splashing about in a pool of the finest bourbon, as if I had drunk deeply of the pool.
In the bar at Canaima, the oldtimers speak of the hermit Alejandro. He had lived longer in the area than anyone else, Indian or white. Once he had been a famous explorer, and he had found diamonds on the mountain as well. He was old now, they said, and his wife and child had left him. He lived alone in the jungle, and on those rare occasions when he came down to Canaima, he spoke only of philosophy and science. He no longer mentioned the strange, ancient beasts he had seen on Auyán-tepui.
We chartered a boat to the hermit’s place. He lived in a canyon shaped like a drunken horseshoe cut out of the awesome bulk of Auyán-tepui. There were twenty separate waterfalls pouring from the canyon rim; one erupted from an oblong hole halfway down the pink canyon wall.
The hermits house looked like any local Indian home. It was constructed of jungle-cut poles and covered over with a thatched roof. In the clearing surrounding the house was a garden: the hermit grew mangoes, lemons, cucumbers, sugarcane, bananas, grapefruit, and oranges.
The hermit met us at the door. He had white, spiky hair, a grizzled beard, and the thoughtful, somewhat troubled face of a man with work to be done, a deadline to be met. He was naked but for a threadbare green blanket fastened around his waist with a leather belt, and a pair of cracked leather boots he wore without laces. His name was Alexander Laime, pronounced limey. He had been born in Latvia sixty-eight years ago, and he had the broad, muscular body of a man half his age.
He shook hands, invited us in, accepted our gifts of food and beer, then told us it was fine with him if we camped in his garden for a few days. He spoke good English, with just the trace of a central European accent. When we arrived, he was sitting at a homemade desk on a tree-stump chair. The book he was reading was about the structure of the cell. He wanted to learn about cells, he said, to better understand
embryology, which he was studying because he felt that somewhere along the evolutionary line, mankind had lost track of the proper meaning of life.
We nodded uncertainly.
For nineteen years, Laime had lived alone in the jungle, nineteen years alone with his thoughts. On his desk there were three smooth stones from the river. On these rocks, he had drawn sternly smiling faces that gazed at him as he read.
Also on the desk, near the rocks, was a cocoon. Laime said he always had one in the house. It thrilled him when the ugly little thing split, when the butterfly shrugged off its drab prison.
“There are some things I have to clear up in my mind,” Laime said, about five minutes after we met him. These things had to do with meaning. There was, he felt, some truer meaning lost in this life. “Thinking,” he said, “is the same thing as dreaming.” He was neither lecturing nor trying to convince us of anything. He was simply trying to puzzle it out, like a hound on an unfamiliar scent. “If you could only find the way,” he said, “I think you could awake from thinking the way you awake from dreaming.” He had done this himself, he said. He had awakened from thinking and moved into a crystalline cerebral state, devoid of the fogs of reality. It happened infrequently, this sudden clarity, and it was important not to question it, otherwise one sank back into the dream of thinking. What he saw, Laime said, when the dream of thinking dropped away, were visions very like those described by the saints or by people who had been pronounced dead and then were brought rudely back to life on the operating table.
Laime had left his native Latvia on August 2, 1939, for a short visit to Holland. When the war broke out, he was unable to return. His travels took him to South America, where he got a job as a surveyor for a large oil company. The work took him to remote areas of the jungle. Soon, he was spending almost as much time in the bush as he was in Caracas. In 1949, he moved to Canaima. The resort then consisted of two tents on the beach of the big lagoon.
Laime got a suitcase down from the shelf. It was crammed with old newspaper clippings. Most of the clippings concerned Laime’s extraordinary explorations; most had pictures of him. He was beardless in the photos and generally dressed in a suit and tie. The face was younger, but the eyes were the same: deep, thoughtful, troubled.
In 1949, Laime led the Ruth Robertson expedition to the base of Angel Falls. He is the first man known to have stood among those misty rainbows. (The local Indians didn’t go into the deep jungles surrounding Auyán-tepui: farming and hunting are better in those spots where the grasslands meet the jungle.)
In 1952, Laime led a second expedition to the base of the falls. In 1955, he cut a trail to the top of the falls. Once again, he had reached a spot where no man had ever stood. That was also the year he led an expedition to the top of Auyán-tepui, the year he located the remains of Jimmy Angel’s airplane, and the year he discovered diamonds.
Diamond mining was then and is today a hazardous business. Even if you hit the Big Strike alone, you’re going to have to sell your diamonds to a registered buyer. It is in the buyer’s interest to get more men to the dig so that diamonds will become more plentiful and the price will go down. Quite often, an Indian is hired to track you back to the site of the dig. Claim jumping is common.
Laime remembered working one dig when he heard noises in the bush. It was an old drinking pal of his from Canaima, Anatoly the Russian, and five hired men, all Italians. Each of the six men carried a gun. Laime grabbed his rifle.
“Now this is our claim,” Anatoly said.
“No,” Laime said, “it’s my claim.”
“What you say is true,” Anatoly said, “but you see, among us we have six rifles.”
Laime thought about this. He stood near cover. The others stood together in a group, in the center of the clearing.
“I have six bullets,” Laime pointed out.
The five Italians looked at one another, then at Laime. They had no wish to die for the Russian. Exit the five Italians. Exit Anatoly.
Laime sorted through the papers in the suitcase, looking for a diamond claim to show me. I saw a number of snapshots in among the clippings. Several of them were of a handsome older woman and a smiling young man. In one, they were sitting in what appeared to be an elegant restaurant, sipping wine from crystal glasses.
“Who are they?” I asked.
“Oh … well, that’s my wife and my son,” Laime said, turning his head away a bit. “They applied to go to the States, you know. In 1960, they were approved. It was either go then or wait many more years. I said go. I had to stay. I hadn’t finished my thinking.” There was, I felt, something more to the story, probably something painful.
“You stayed,” I said.
“Yes. Well, you see, I cannot think in the States. Even in Caracas I am lost. I …” Laime sorted through his papers nervously, anxious to change the subject.
“Here,” he said, handing me a sheet of paper. It was a drawing that would have delighted Conan Doyle himself. It showed a black, vaguely prehistoric-looking beast, an animal Laime said he had seen in 1955, on the same trip during which he had discovered Jimmy Angel’s plane. Laime said he had been walking in the river itself. Quite a bit ahead of him, he had seen some strange, dark shapes sunning on some rocks in a deep pool. They looked like seals. Laime moved closer. They were not seals. They had elongated necks and ancient, reptilian faces. Each had four flippers; two in front, two in back. When the things saw him, they slithered off the rocks and dropped sleekly into the water. There had been three of them, and each had been about three feet long.
Laime went to his bookshelf, pulled out a volume on prehistoric animals, and showed us an artist’s rendering of a ten-foot-long marine reptile called Plesiosaurus. It looked vaguely seallike, with an elongated neck and four flippers. Plesiosaurus died out 60 million years ago, in the early Cenozoic. Laime had underlined that.
The second study he showed us—which, like the first, has been discredited by later scholarship—was a pamphlet about the geological history of the Guiana Highlands. Millions upon millions of years ago, the report said, an eastward-lying continent had laid great masses of sediment on the ocean floor. The report said that the jolting uplifts of 70 million years ago had lifted much of the highlands out of the sea.
Laime had spent a lot of time thinking about what he had read: with so many thousands of square miles boiling up out of the sea, certainly some marine animals must have been lifted up along with land. That was 70 million years ago. The great dinosaur die-out had happened 60 million years ago. Laime thought that in 10 million years, Plesiosaurus might have evolved into a smaller, freshwater animal.
He had gone back to the spot many times, looking for the animals. They were like him, he said. They lived alone on the mountain. “Maybe now they have all died out,” he said. “Maybe I saw the last of them.” He walked to the door and stared numbly out toward the mountain. When he came back into the house, there was a shimmering glaze in his eyes.
“You know what the word canaima means?” he asked. “It is an Indian word for a spirit, an evil spirit or a bad omen. You see, Charlie Baughan, the American pilot, he saw this place many years ago and wanted to make a tourist camp. He didn’t understand the language, but the Indians were always talking about canaima, canaima. He liked the word, and that is what he called the place.
“The Indians hate the idea of death, you see. It makes nothing of a person’s life. Whenever anyone dies, someone else always says they saw a canaima the day before: an albino parrot, a misshapen fish. Much better that someone should die from supernatural causes, no? If death is magical, then life is more important, you see.”
Laime didn’t talk about his own death. He fingered the gray cocoon on his desk and said, “I am awake all night, while I dream, you see. While I dream, I am conscious. But it seems as if I just close my eyes, and it is morning.” He looked at me, then turned to the smiling river rocks on his desk and shrugged in an embarrassed fashion. “On the calendar, I see the years have gone by
. Twenty years. But I don’t feel it. I go to a place inside.” He tapped the back of his skull. “I see cities and forests, and all the colors are bright. These places are all new to me.”
He looked down at the cocoon in his fingers. “I see in the mirror that I am growing old. But it is like a dream and I don’t feel it. I feel as if I am living out of time.”
He held the cocoon up to the sun and stared at it for a long time, trying to see the winged creature within.
The red road south from El Dorado was pitted with potholes filled with what appeared to be muddy tomato soup. It was raining. It was always raining. Sometimes the Land Cruisers seemed like submarines at the bottom of a turbulent gray sea. On Roraima, so we had been told, it rains four hundred days a year.
We turned left at the village of San Francisco, then clattered over fifteen miles of grassland until we came to a river that defeated the Land Cruisers. We collected our gear and made off on foot for Peraitepuy, the last village before the mountain.
Peraitepuy consisted of about twenty thatch-roofed huts. People watched us curiously from doorways, then ducked inside when we approached. They smiled but would not let us get within twenty feet of them. However, when the sky burst open and the steady drizzle became a torrent, a nervous young man approached and asked us, please, to take refuge in the village schoolhouse. We thanked him and asked him if he could find Feliciano, the guide. Yes, the man told us. Feliciano would come soon.