Apex domains cannot have CNAME records.
Question and response
Question
dig tophiking.net. NS
Answer
tophiking.net. 5 NS ns-524.awsdns-01.net.
tophiking.net. 5 NS ns-1490.awsdns-58.org.
tophiking.net. 5 NS ns-1607.awsdns-08.co.uk.
tophiking.net. 5 NS ns-148.awsdns-18.com.
Authority
The response has no authority records.
Additional
. 0 OPT ; payload 1232, xrcode 0, version 0, flags 0