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This broad estuary, extending inland for thirty miles or more, with numerous picturesque islands covered by tropical vegetation rising out of it, is joined by the united streams of the Masaruni and Cuyuni, its own and their romantic waterfalls making a continuous navigation up them impossible.
Another traveller, Hillhouse, in 1830 ascended the Masaruni, which flows from the northern side of the mountains of Roraima, among which the lake is situated; and believes that its romantic valley was once the bed of a large lake twelve miles in width, and upwards of one hundred miles in length, which long ago burst its barriers and gave rise to the fable still preserved among the Indians, and, till within almost the present century, believed in by the colonists themselves.
Whole families, however, even of Indians, are sometimes drowned; and in 1805 Captain Beresford, son-in-law of the governor, and four other gentlemen, with two of their crew, lost their lives in shooting the lower falls of the Masaruni."
Huge caymans abound in the river, and lie like logs of wood at the foot of the cataracts or rapids, watching stealthily to catch and swallow whatever the fierce current may bring down to them. Above these falls is a lagoon, on which he discovered the now far-famed Victoria Regia, before that time unknown to the world. At the head of the Masaruni rises Mount Roraima, 7540 feet in height.
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