After all, consider Georgetown: It is a place of once-grand cricket stadiums and colonial mansions gone to seed, wood fires scenting the air like incense and bamboo poles flying Hindu spirit flags. The U.S. State Department warns about violence against "people of wealth" in the streets, i.e. tourists. After my arrival last night, I read two very curious stories in the local Stabroek News: "Ricky Chamatalk, 24, died when, riding his motorcycle downtown without a helmet, he collided with a cow." And more disturbingly: "Sean Warde, 25, died after being chopped about the body by two men with cutlasses, at whom he had allegedly thrown a grenade." A cutlass, a grenade, an immobile cow -- all seem so much more urgent than global warming.

But, as I was told, that was the frontier capital. The interior would be different, rural and friendly. Just watch for the bushmasters and take your anti-malaria pills, and you'd do just fine.

A place of refuge could be a very good thing, indeed -- especially for a nature-minded guy like myself adrift in an industrialized world bereft of connection -- and I looked forward to finally staking out some space in it. Beyond the oxygen benefit, large, undisturbed chunks of jungle like this support megafauna that is rare elsewhere -- the tapir, the jaguar, the giant otter, the harpy eagle. Discovery still seems possible here, not by virtue of a remote-control device but by one's own wits. For me, that is El Dorado enough.

For now, the pre-Cambrian brink awaits. Mike and I shuffle out to its lip. There are no guardrails or warning signs, and we step across a gaping fissure in the rock, graphically leaving solid ground behind. "Years ago," says Mike, "that crack was so small you couldn't get your finger in it." Just several feet away, the shallow Potaro begins its long blackwater cascade down into the gorge.

At the bottom, the fallen river swirls furiously like a washing machine, sending up vapor that creates a rainbow in the bright tropical sun. Its energy is potent, producing a muffled echo of thunder that resonates against my skin like sensory riffles. My hair seems to be standing on end, but I am not sure if it is from the upwelling charge or the realization that one giant step would put me over the edge.

"On Feb. 4," says Mike, with no preamble, "four white peccaries went over these falls." Then, without further explanation, he turns and walks back over the crevice to solid ground.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Shouldering my single bag and backpack at dawn, I trudge out to the tarmac of the Ogle Aerodome in Georgetown to catch a flight to the Mikushi village of Annai. The plane, a boxy prop locals call the "Flying Coffin," looks like a miniature Spruce Goose. My fellow passengers are mostly Brazilians, headed deeper into their own country. As I board through a port in the tail, a woman hands me a paper box of apple juice and what appears to be a mustard sandwich, crust trimmed off and sealed in plastic wrap.

Up we go, making a U-turn over the Caribbean Sea, which is clouded brown by sediment here, and sealed like my sandwich from Georgetown by a massive dike. The Dutch, who settled Georgetown in the 1600s, built the first seawall of wood. Now reinforced with concrete, it opens only to drain the broad Demerara River, an aquatic highway that winds inland, beyond the wooden stilt homes and shops of the capital and past a wafflelike grid of cane fields.

We fly into a cloud bank, and when we emerge barely a minute later, there is nothing but green, resplendently wild green, veined by rivers and punctuated with waterfalls. We are squarely atop the equatorial forest and swamp now, the basin between where the Orinoco and the Amazon join with the sea.

Guyana is in the middle of the thick swatch of forest called the Guiana Shield that stretches across the northern rim of South America. It holds the best of what is left of the tropical forest of this continent: In Guyana, there are 22 forested acres for each person; in Brazil, where the population is taking increasingly larger slash-and-burn whacks out of the forest, the ratio is only 3 to 1.

Another hour puts us over the Rupununi, the vast grassy savanna. Before Guyanese Brahmans lost their cachet in the world beef market, Mikushi cowboys tended cattle on this tropical range. Below, the village of Annai sprawls at the cusp of the Rupununi and Kanuku mountains. The Brazilian border is only 25 miles to the west, on the other side of the Ireng River. Down we go onto a narrow strip, dropping like a carnival ride.

As soon as we screech to a stop, there is much shouting. A Canadian photographer and I, the only passengers at this destination, are urged to pick up our bags and quickly exit through the rear. The pilot keeps his motor revved, and as soon as we are clear of the plane, it shoots away from us, leaving us in the prop wash with Colin Edwards, an expat Brit. "Welcome to the Rupununi," says Colin, stocky, barefoot and convivial. "Breakfast is ready."

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