A very, very strange place …
The entire southeastern part of Venezuela is occupied by La Grande Sabana, a great savannah crossed by the Caroni River, the right tributary of the Orinoco. There are many unusual plateaus here - with steep, inaccessible walls several hundred meters high - that look like huge tables. They are called "mazas", which means "tables" in Spanish.
One of the greatest "tables" - Roraima, which is near the Venezuelan border with Brazil - was inaccessible to people for a long time. Only the daredevils from the Indian tribes from time to time made their way to the enchanted, from their point of view, land, telling their fellow tribesmen about the wonderful, fantastic plateau with steep walls, cascades of waterfalls falling from them and magical rivers with red and black waters.
The first European explorers to visit this area in the middle of the 19th century were the German scientist Robert Schombrook and the English botanist Yves Serne, who presented an account of their journey in one of the German scientific journals. However, at that time their story seemed to everyone, to put it mildly, improbable. Indeed, no one has yet seen rivers with colored water, live exotic animals and birds that lived on our planet in the distant past, have not found plants, each of which was still unknown to science. Unusual, according to the stories of Schombrook and Serne, was the plateau climate: eternal summer with a strange change of day and night. Now for several days on the plateau there was a clear sunny day, then suddenly, unexpectedly, during "off-hours" time, pitch darkness fell on this corner for several hours. In a word, time flowed here according to its own laws, not obeying earthly ones.
Everything was decided by chance
Subsequently, for almost 100 years, none of the researchers visited the plateau - and this is understandable. The road here is extremely difficult: the Guiana Highlands, cut by gorges, and the dense thickets of the equatorial forest that surround Roraima, made it almost inaccessible.
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A new word in the exploration of this region belongs to the simple American pilot James Crawford Angel (the Spanish version of his name is Juan Angel). In 1937, flying over the Orinoco River basin and straying off course, he saw a river that was not marked on any map. Following its course, Angel suddenly found that he was no longer flying over the plain, but into the gorge.
The plane was surrounded by mountains on both sides, and there was no way to turn it around and follow its previous course. Finally, with incredible difficulty, the pilot managed to land on the plateau. It was unsuccessful: the plane got stuck in a swamp, and Angel for two weeks then made his way from this enchanted paradise to the nearest Indian settlement. He later described his impressions in a book, which scientists immediately ranked as science fiction.
A lost place
Juan ngel spent the last years of his life in Venezuela, where he died in 1956. The ashes of the brave pilot, according to the will, were scattered over the plateau. But only 10 years later, his son Rolland, who believed every word in his father's book, was able to organize a large expedition to those parts.
It turned out that it was not for nothing that the Indians consider the plateau a lost place: a mountainous island with an area of almost 900 square kilometers is one of the regions of thunderstorms and lightning. They hit here almost daily, and there is not a single tree that has not been crippled by lightning. Here, by the way, the expedition discovered the greatest waterfall in the world, named after the discoverer Angel Falls, which has another unique feature: usually waterfalls are born on rivers, and this one itself gives rise to a river!
What is this lost world? Here is what the expedition diary says:
“The plateau turned out to be a monolithic rock with fantastic outlines. Mounds like mushrooms rise among the flat surface, peculiar depressions in the form of small "saucers" filled with water are scattered everywhere. The highest point of the plateau - a mountain with a height of 2810 meters - is separated from the rest of the territory by deep and wide cracks, which are impossible to cross without stairs”. The local fauna also turned out to be unusual: in addition to the already known to science possums, lizards, black toads and frogs, snakes, spiders and many unfamiliar species of butterflies, the researchers managed to find a strange animal here, which they called the cadborosaurus. It resembled a large snake with a horse's head and humps on its back. Its body length is about 15 meters!
There were also small frogs that, like birds, hatch frogs, bats, blood-sucking insects, on which no chemical means of self-defense act, very aggressive and dangerous not only for animals, but also for people, gulliver ants over five centimeters, capable of biting tree branches with steel jaws. But the most remarkable discovery was the bones of prehistoric animals. It seemed that these animals lived here in abundance until recently. Why they died is unknown. Perhaps they were being experimented with by the ubiquitous aliens?
Such a hypothesis is not without foundation: after all, not far from the waterfall, the expedition discovered a large round area, completely devoid of vegetation and as if sprinkled with some kind of silvery powder (laboratory experiments later showed that this is an alloy of very rare metals that cannot be obtained under terrestrial conditions).
And one more mystery: the events in the famous novel "The Lost World" by Conan Doyle take place exactly in those places - at least many descriptions of the landscape, flora and fauna almost exactly coincide with the descriptions of what the expedition members saw. But this science fiction novel was published … back in 1912!
Unexpected surprise
Exploration of local caves also brought many mysteries to scientists. The expedition discovered many rock paintings, skillfully depicting unusual animals and creatures that vaguely resemble people. Here, the researchers stumbled upon several crypts, in which a fog seemed to thicken and some sweet-sugary aroma hovered. Several scientists, breathing this smell, lay in a coma for several days, then telling their colleagues about extraordinary visions and travels to other worlds.
In the end, it was decided to return back, and then a new surprise awaited the brave travelers: they could not get out of the lost world. The radios were out of order long ago, the landscape, the map of which was made by the expedition, seemed to have changed the outlines and cardinal points. Roraima did not let go of those who learned her secrets.
Only a few months later, exhausted by the search for a way out, people were able to return home. According to them, "some unknown force, like a whirlwind, picked us up and gently lowered us in the central square of one of the Indian villages." By that time, the members of the expedition ran out of food, their clothes became unusable, many were on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
When the travelers finally managed to reach civilization, it turned out that their families had buried them long ago: after all, the detachment did not return after the planned several months of work, and according to the earthly chronology, the researchers had been absent for four years!
More official expeditions were not equipped there. However, from time to time, daredevils try to penetrate this lost world, where, as a rule, they find their death: the zone does not like to let go of its victims.