26o TlMEHRI. 
where exposed, had been washed away, but that where 
capped and protected by small patches either of con- 
glomerate or hardened mud, it still stood in the form of 
pillarlets- -sometimes even of great pillars — of sand, 
corresponding to the pillarlets of snow. Not seldom, 
hundreds of these pillars stand in great pits formed by 
the washing away of the sand from a hill-side. The 
phenomenon is indeed so common as to have earned a 
name from the Indians of the district, who call such 
places Eppeling. 
The most noticeable instances of these eppelings 
were on a hill near the village of Konkarmo, some 50 
miles south, but within sight of Roraima. At some five 
different parts of that hill, apparently very many hun- 
dreds of tons — in one place very many thousands of 
tons — of sand had been washed away, leaving countless 
ere6l pillars, of which the tallest corresponded in height 
to the original height of that part of the hill. The whole 
effe6l was most peculiar. Sometimes, I may add in 
parenthesis, the picturesque effecl; of these places was 
much increased by the extraordinarily pure and vivid 
rose-red colour of the sand. 
Eppelings, on the comparatively small scale here des- 
cribed, abound about Roraima. I have dwelt on them 
because it seems to me that the group of remarkable 
pillar-like mountains of which Roraima is chief is but an 
eppeling on a gigantic scale, formed in the same way, 
and altogether — except in its gigantic size — equivalent 
to the pillarlets on the loose water-washed earth and to 
the pillarlets of snow on the snow-drifts. 
Here it occurs to me that, having dwelt so long on 
the pillar-like form of Roraima, I had better explain 
