Through British Guiana to the summit of Roraima

In 1909, Cecil Clementi embarked on one of the most audacious journeys of the Edwardian age: a grueling expedition through the unmapped interior of British Guiana to reach the summit of Mount Roraima, a vast table-top mountain rising nearly 3,000 feet above the jungle like something from a lost world. This is travel writing at its most transporting. Clementi chronicles the relentless heat, the river crossings, the near-impossible scrambles up sheer sandstone cliffs, and the reward: a landscape so alien it seems lifted from fantasy, with waterfalls plunging into mist and ancient rocks carved by wind and rain into impossible shapes. He writes not as a colonial administrator cataloguing territory, but as a man genuinely awed by what he sees. The book pulses with the particular thrill of early exploration, when large parts of the globe still held genuine secrets. For readers who dream of journeys that no longer exist, this is a portal.