Mount Roraima. 263 
Surely no stranger sight than that which now met our 
eyes was ever seen. Now and again in an old picture by 
some skilled painter, who, never having been outside 
his flat rockless native land, has yet ventured to add an 
imaginative background of rocky landscape to his figure 
subje6ts, is to be seen some approach to the landscape 
on Roraima, In the foreground, on either hand, rose a 
fantastic pyramid of rock, and these were as the gate- 
posts ; within, on the right, three detached pillar-like 
blocks of stone, lying evenly side by side on the top of 
one huge square block, pointed, in marvellously close 
resemblance to three great guns, outward through the 
entrance. Within the gate thus strangely guarded lay a 
great plain, with surface generally somewhat uneven, 
its lowest flatter parts clothed with a grass-like and very 
peculiar vegetation, the even stretch of which was 
broken by but a few, singly and widely scattered, very 
low shrubs, its higher more swelling parts of bare rock 
curiously, most elaborately, and intricately terraced. 
Through the plain meandered numberless tiny stream- 
lets of clearest water, now falling in miniature cascades 
over the sloping rocks, then winding through the grass, 
and again widening out into little pools. And on this 
plain, singly, in the foreground, but more and more 
abundantly in the distance, till they excluded further 
view, were ranged, in orderly disorder, many single 
masses and piles of masses of great rocks from 20 to 80 
feet high, — each single rock, each pile of rocks, of per- 
fectly indescribable, nay — to those who have never seen 
them — incredible, strangeness of form. It seemed a 
disordered gallery of countless vast stone monsters. Here 
was a rocking.stone — or so it seemed until experiment 
