Adventurers flock to Venezuela's Lost World mountain

A mystic, flat-topped mountain on the Venezuela-Brazil border that perplexed 19th-century explorers and inspired The Lost World novel is attracting ever more modern-day adventurers.

Once impenetrable to all but the Pemon indigenous people, several thousand hikers a year now make the three-day trek across savannah, through rivers, under a waterfall and along a narrow path scaling the cliffs of Mount Roraima.

While those throngs are a boon to Venezuela's tottering tourism industry, they also scatter a prehistoric landscape with unwanted litter and strain a delicate ecosystem.