Angel Falls drops 979 metres, and most of the water never reaches the bottom as water. It breaks into wind-blown mist hundreds of metres above the ground, so what lands at the base is a cold drifting cloud rather than a torrent. The longest unbroken section is 807 metres of free fall; below that the remainder regathers and tumbles the rest of the way in cascades. It comes off the edge of Auyán-tepui, a flat-topped sandstone plateau almost two billion years old, whose name means House of the Devil. Tepuis like it stand with sheer walls above the forests of southern Venezuela, and their summits are so cut off that Arthur Conan Doyle set The Lost World on one. The Pemón call the fall Kerepakupai Merú. Its usual name comes from Jimmie Angel, an American bush pilot who flew over it in 1933 while prospecting for gold.
There is no road within a hundred kilometres. You come up the river in a curiara, a long motorised dugout steered by Pemón boatmen, for several hours through a gorge lined with forest and side waterfalls. Then a steep root-tangled path climbs to a pool at the foot of the drop, and you sleep in a hammock within earshot of it. The falls keep their own schedule. They run hardest in the rainy months, roughly June to November, but cloud caps the tepui most of the time and the full column shows only in the clear minutes just after dawn. By midday the sun on the spray hangs rainbows across the gorge. In the dry season the river drops too low for boats and the fall thins to a thread, so trips switch to light aircraft. Venezuela's political situation has kept visitor numbers low for years.