Word: plateau
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...that jungle-covered spot of northern South America, where Venezuela, British Guiana and Brazil touch each other angularly, is Mt. Roraima, famed among travelers and explorers. It is a huge wall of red rock that rises, like a ruddy tree trunk, 1,500 ft. sheer above the surrounding plateau and altogether some 8,500 ft. above sea level. It seems unscalable...
Quaint birds, animals and reptiles moved about them-atop Mt. Roraima, and on the plateau below. Mr. Carter killed a jaguar as it was feeding on its kill, a colt. The elder Mr. Tate killed a poisonous bushmaster snake five feet long just after he had stepped across it in the dark. One of their 130 Arecuna Indian porters hacked with his machete at a 14-ft. anaconda until it was dead and ready for eating. (Anaconda flesh tastes something like chicken.) They snared birds, netted insects, disinterred ground plants, culled orchids from their treeholds, pounced on small beasts. Rare...
...first planned to pitch our base camp on the Farnsworth-Treasure Room Plateau, but by dint of much boosting from behind we were able to drive our pack animals higher. Sliding, slipping, going down on all four haunches (something a yak is rarely forced, or even able, to do) the animals somehow reached the General Reading Plateau. Here we pitched Camp No. 1, twenty thousand feet above the sea, one hundred feet above the street car line...
...Fritz McCarthy, to whom I would soon say goodbye forever, had one of his thoughts. "Wait a year," he said with the roguish twinkle that gained him the reputation of "funster" around camp. He strapped on his climbing shoes with the heavy iron spikes, and disappeared across the plateau and into the Reading Room. A minute later he came in sight. He had two natives under each arm, whose whole lives, as he told us, had been spent in the vicinity of the peak. Had they ever been to the top? Answering with fluent hands in sign language they said...
Rains. Over the Central Plateau of Mexico the rains descended and the floods arose, threatening inundation of Mexico City. Hundreds were rendered homeless; crops in large areas were ruined; railroads were washed out at many points; canals burst their banks; a bull ring almost collapsed; many houses were partially submerged...