Notes on Plants at Roraima. 157 
first to be mentioned is that of the Kaieteur savannah.* 
This is certainly a very remarkable place with a 
very remarkable vegetation. It is an open space, 
some two miles long by one across, in the heart of 
the ordinary dense forest, and some four days' journey 
on foot from the nearest open country. It has been 
said that the descent from the table-land of the inte- 
rior toward the sea is not a gradual slope but occurs chiefly 
in a series of steplike descents which are generally of 
no great individual height. But the descent at the 
Kaieteur takes the form of an almost abrupt cliff — at the 
Kaieteur fall itself it is an actual cliff — of between seven 
and eight hundred feet in height. The Potaro river, rising 
apparently from the neighbourhood of, but not actually 
on, Roraima, after an unknown upper course of con- 
siderable length, here runs along one side of the almost 
perfectly level Kaieteur savannah and precipitates 
itself, at the east end of that savannah, down the abrupt 
descent of 800 feet. The savannah itself is virtually a 
flat exposed rock, many parts of which are as absolutely 
bare as a London pavement. This rock is sandstone, 
which, as in the eppelling— indeed it probably is an 
eppelling, but of unusually unbroken surface — is capped 
by a harder material, by a layer of conglomerate. Just 
as the hard surface of the eppellings cracks and 
eventually affords roothold in the fissures thus made for 
plants, so the hard conglomerate covering of the 
Kaieteur savannah has cracked, and in many of the 
fissures thus produced has given root-hold to plants. 
* A very instrudtive paper on ' The aspeft and flora of the Kaieteur 
Savannah' by Mr. G. S. Jenman, F.L.S., is to be found in the firsr 
volume of Timehri, p. 229. 
