Mount Roraima. 259 
most striking of a group of similar mountains. If you 
have followed and realised the description I have given 
of Roraima as quite essentially pillar -like in form, you 
will not find it hard to follow me when I now declare 
that Sir Robert Schomburgk's description of this 
whole group of pillar-like mountains, of which Roraima 
is but slightly the most remarkable, as resembling, when 
seen from a sufficiently distant height, an indescribably 
vast natural forum — a forum in ruins — is an entirely 
adequate and satisfactory description of the appearance 
of the group. 
Or perhaps, if you will let me depict the group in yet 
another way, it may raise a more distinct mental picture. 
Probably most of you have noticed in winter, when 
a thaw has set in after heavy snow, how, on the 
vanishing snow-drifts, small pillarlets of snow, capped 
and protected each by some small pebble, are ranged 
over the surface ; and, if you have been in the tropics, 
you will, after some terrific downpour of water — such as 
often there takes the place of our gentler rains — have 
seen, on some thrown-up heap of loose soil, many pillar- 
lets of earth like those pillarlets of snow. And again, if 
you had walked with me to Roraima over the savannahs — 
over those swelling surfaces, barely covered by a thin sheet 
of hardest conglomerate, or of hardened mud, but really 
consisting of sand which is just coherent enough to 
seem at some times sandstone — just friable enough to 
seem, at another time, rather sand than sandstone — you 
would have seen that, in places, the conglomerate or 
mud sheet had been broken up, and lay in small patches 
over the otherwise exposed and underlying sand, and 
would have noticed that there, occasionally, the sand, 
HH 2 
