158 TlMEHRI. 
Some of these latter fissures have gradually been filled 
up by the accumulation of vegetable matter ; others 
remain still open. On this savannah, however, the 
fissures are larger than is commonly the case in 
eppellings, are in fact often very long, though generally 
narrow. Many of these are now entirely occupied 
by shrubs and dwarf trees. The lines of these masses 
of vegetation, necessarily following the lines of the 
fissures, present, in most remarkable degree, the 
appearance of the well marked lines designed by a 
landscape gardener ; and the whole effect is as of an arti- 
ficial garden, with regular groups of shrubs separated by 
wide paths and roads of clean bare rock. Moreover it is 
not only in the fissures that plants grow on this savannah. 
As on the eppellings so here to, a certain number of 
plants find sufficient roothold in the vegetable accumula- 
tions in the slight depressions in the conglomerate sheet 
before these have been engraved deeply enough to leave 
the sandstone exposed and to make regular fissures. 
But not only is the arrangement of the vegetation of 
the savannah thus very remarkable. The plants compos- 
ing this vegetation are also individually of great interest. 
As might be expected, very few of them occur in the 
forest which everywhere, and for a great distance, 
surrounds this strange open space. Much more remark- 
able is it that very few of these plants occur on the 
nearest savannah, nor indeed, on the general savannah 
land of the interior. And most noteworthy of all is it that a 
very large number of these peculiar plants of this isolated 
savannah occur, often with slight but interesting differ- 
ences, on Roraima. 
By far the most striking, as it is' also' the most abun- 
