Lost in the Lost World

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So when I decided to visit this very farthest corner of the Lost World-only to get stuck in Icabaru-you could say I should have known better.

After a long, hard night on a cot in the Hotel El Niño-listening to clouds of hungry mosquitoes and the gurgles of passion until dawn-escape wasn't looking any more probable. No new trucks. No buses. Not even any private vehicles. Back in the bar on the plaza, the same beer-guzzling miners were already drunk at 9 A.M.; they seemed to be fingering their bowie knives, looking me over in a rather predatory fashion.

And then one of the barmaids, who was obsessively curling her hair, said: 'Of course, you could get an air taxi. . . .'

I couldn't believe my ears. Apparently at any given time there were a dozen freelance pilots buzzing around in the skies above, zipping back and forth like bees, just waiting to be radioed down by someone like me. That was how diamond miners got about when they were on a lucky streak. But since they were expensive, nobody in Icabaru had thought to mention them. All I had to do was go back to Señora Esmeralda, bribe her with a few bolivars, call down the closest air taxi and fork over a crisp $100 bill.

It worked. Soon I was back at the airstrip, strapping myself into the front seat of my own private Cessna, waving farewell to the recruit (who looked extremely peeved that I'd worked this much out). By air, it was only six minutes to El Pauji, where a football field doubled as an airstrip. All I had to do was cajole someone else to drive me the last half hour to Kawaik. . . .

Nothing to it.

I had history on my side: Bush planes have been integral to the mythology of the Lost World since 1935.

That was when a penniless American pilot named Jimmy Angel, hanging around a Panama City hotel lobby, was offered $5,000 in cash to fly into Venezuela on a secret mission. Angel took his employer, an elderly Mexican, onto the surface of Auyan-tepui ('hell of a place to land a plane'), where they supposedly gathered 75 pounds of gold from a stream. But when Angel tried to repeat the stunt alone, not only did he find no gold, but his monoplane became bogged. As a sort of consolation prize, Angel discovered the world's highest waterfall on the long climb down. It now bears his name-confirming the idea that anything could and would turn up in this part of South America.

The latest proof was right in front of me. In a sculpted garden oasis surrounded by dry sandstone scrub, Kawaik's so-called 'jungle lodge' looked like a clubhouse designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. It had no walls, so cool breezes could waft through; exotic flowers bulged from every corner. And even more disorienting, the place was run by South American yuppies. Mauro, who came out to meet me, looked like a Hollywood agent, his ponytailed hair bleached by the sun; his angelic, honey-tanned wife Elsa wandered barefoot in a flowing caftan; two naked children cavorted in a tenuously burbling stream. Had I come all this way to visit a Venezuelan version of Santa Fe?

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