Lost in the Lost World

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'You arrived in Icabaru yesterday?' Mauro giggled. 'I thought you were coming tomorrow! What do you think of those miners, eh? They're people without culture. Very angry. Very violent.'

From one of Mauro's wooden cabins, inhabited by hummingbirds and tiny frogs, I had a shower watching the sun set across a distant tepui. This was the last outpost of the Lost World, last stop before Brazil-but it felt like I'd gone too far. There was a sense of detachment, of being in fantasyland. What was I doing here? Even more to the point: What were these guys doing here?That night, slugging back cuba libres, Mauro and Elsa recounted Venezuela's Great Yuppie Exodus of the 1990s. Apparently it was a far-reaching social phenomenon. They had both been working as architects in the capital, Caracas-polluted, crime-ridden, traffic-clogged. One year, they came down to the Gran Sabana on vacation; a few weeks later, they'd quit their jobs and moved down here to live.

Over the next few days, Mauro did show off the wonders of his new home. Not far below Kawaik sprawled empires of rainforest-although, of course, gold miners had reduced great strips to fields of smoking dust, like trench scenes from World War I. The diamond prospectors who trudged past with their picks on their backs were Greenpeace activists by comparison.

Clusters of these latter-day conquistadores gathered at a solitary bodega to buy flour with stones. The diamonds all looked like specks of dirty quartz, and identifying one amid the dross was the most valuable skill of all-at least according to one leader, an obese old Italian named Luigi. Mi ojo, he said, pulling down a lid and patting his potbelly. 'I'm old and fat, but one good eye is worth 40 arms.' In fact, he was being modest; the 154-carat Bolivar diamond, found outside Icabaru in 1942, had been spotted by a miner looking through the offcuts of other digs. Someone had tossed it aside as worthless.

At the end of humid trails lay sinuous rivers, where the occasional motorized canoe would speed up and down-past canyons of vegetation and falls spurting water the color of tea-to Pemon Indian villages. Easily reached by missionaries, these long ago lost their thatch-roofed huts to concrete boxes. Each settlement felt eerily deserted. Most of the Pemons were leaving for the towns, Mauro explained, since apart from helping miners transport their gear, there was no work. 'Nobody does anything here anymore. They don't even grow fruit.'

Below a river headland, a team of miners was landing with their canoes. I was watching them through a telephoto lens. The men started screaming and hiding. One put a rifle to his shoulder. There were some sharp noises, although I wasn't sure from where.

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