At one point, DJ slipped and started a landslide which nearly took me with it. It looked too dangerous to attempt as we had no ropes or climbing gear so we stuck to the forested talus slope at the bottom and cut around hoping that an obvious way up would present itself. Just like in the story, we came to a rock pinnacle. At the top, they felled the one tree that grew there, using it as a bridge to clamber across. In the book, the group climbed a spire of rock that stood slightly apart from the main rock wall. Just like the exploring party in Conan Doyle's novel, we could not find a route up when we reached the foot of the plateau's cliffs. We set off on July 15, coincidentally the same day as the explorers set-out upriver toward the Lost World in Conan Doyle's novel. He said that no one had been here before to look for the Lost World and that much of our route would be as it had for Fawcett 83 years earlier. The town's mayor (also its doctor), Dr André, arranged a jeep for us. We hired a guide, Edevaldo Francisco "Badu", bought provisions and hired porters to carry our gear on the overland sections of the trip. We would go to the Serra Ricardo Franco and show why this mountain, not anywhere else in the world, was the true inspiration for Conan Doyle's adventure.Īs with Fawcett, our starting point was Vila Bela, a frontier town on the end of an unpaved highway which might one day lead to Bolivia. That was the story I pitched to the expedition's prospective members in a pub in Lancaster, England in the Spring of 2001. After making it back he claimed to have corresponded with and shown pictures to Conan Doyle, the result of which was the author's dinosaur novel. The Royal Geographical Society in London sent him there to arbitrate a dispute between the two countries as to where the border actually lay. His descriptions of the Serra Ricardo Franco come from his ascent of the Rio Verde which runs along part of the border between Bolivia and Brazil. Isolated from the battle with changing conditions, monsters from the dawn of man's existence might still roam those heights unchallenged, imprisoned and protected by unscalable cliffs.įawcett is much better known for never returning from a later expedition to look for a lost city. They stood like a lost world, forested to their tops, and the imagination could picture the last vestiges there of an age long vanished. Time and the foot of man had not touched those summits. Our expedition was born from the quote below, written by the English explorer, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett in 1908.Ībove us towered the Ricardo Franco hills, flat-topped and mysterious, their flanks scarred by deep quebradas. Most scholars now believe our assertion that the real Lost World was our table-mountain in Brazil, but there is no reference to our expedition or the proof we brought back. I had climbed Roraima and found that though it matched the novel's descriptions viewing from a distance, its summit was rain-scoured and desolate. We discover 20 years on the prevailing opinion that Mount Roraima in Venezuela had been Doyle's inspiration was no longer the case. Now stuck at home with the COVID-19 pandemic, DJ Clark, now working with China Daily in Hong Kong and myself in the UK, revisit our findings. It has spawned at least five movies, a TV series and has been imitated across various media ever since. Published in 1912, it is still the definite story of man-meets-dinosaurs. Twenty years ago three British explorers climbed a remote plateau in Amazonian Brazil on a quest to discover the geographical inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic novel, The Lost World.
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