The Voltzberg Dome is a bald granite dome 240 metres high standing out of the roadless rainforest of the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, in Suriname, reached by a day's journey up the Coppename river in a dugout korjaal and a four-hour walk through forest that has never been cut or hunted, with cacti growing on its summit and the largest lek of the cock-of-the-rock in the Guianas at its foot. The dome is an inselberg, a knob of granite two billion years old that the rain has stripped of soil while the forest grew around it, and nothing else stripped it, since the rock sheds water and heat too fast for anything but lichen and a few succulents to hold on; the only way in is by water, from the Raleighvallen rapids where the river breaks over black rock and the camp stands on an island, and then six kilometres of primary forest, creeks crossed on fallen trunks, buttress roots taller than a person and fungi on every rotting branch, with spider monkeys and macaws overhead. The climb goes up the bare granite before the sun finds it, since the dome is shadeless and turns into a hotplate later, and the top gives a view over unbroken forest to every horizon, the canopy going grey with distance.
The cock-of-the-rock lek is the other reason for the walk. From December to April some 55 orange males hold cleared courts on the forest floor near the dome, each on his own patch of ground, bowing and flaring their crests for whichever brown female comes to look, hardest at dawn, in a display that has been studied here for decades. The reserve is 1.6 million hectares of forest joined into one block in 1998 from three older reserves, brokered by Conservation International and the government, and it is one of the least visited places in South America, with a handful of visitors a week. The Voltzberg is a bare rock in a green sea, and the birds dance at its foot.