"Above us towered the Ricardo Franco Hills,
flat topped and mysterious, their flanks scarred by deep
quebradas. Time and the foot of man had not touched those
summits. They stood like a lost world, forested to their
tops, and the imagination could picture the last vestiges
there of an age long vanished. 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. So thought Conan
Doyle when later in London I spoke of these hills and
showed photographs of them. He mentioned an idea for a novel
on Central South America and asked for information, which
I told him I should be glad to supply. The fruit of it was
his lost world in 1912." Lt. Col. PH Fawcett, Exploration
Fawcett
It is usually supposed that the 'tepuy' table mountain
of Roraima in Venezuela was the basis for Conan Doyle's
Lost World. Conan Doyle is said to have been inspired by
a talk about the tepuis that he attended at the Royal
Geographical Society, and the route the explorers take
in the story (which is covered in some detail) tallies with
the journey overland and by river from the city of Manaus
Northwards to the Venezuelan Border.
However, the details of the journey also apply if you
were to travel Southwards through the Amazon to similar
pre-Cambrian pinnacles in the Brazilian Mato Grosso. The
English explorer, Colonel Fawcett claimed these rock
formations were the true inspiration for 'The Lost World'.
He spent several weeks, with his party almost starving,
in the 'poisoned hell' of the Rio Verde in 1908, and he
later wrote that his friend Conan-Doyle used information
from this expedition in 'The Lost World', which was
published in 1912. Certainly descriptions of the forest
and Indian tribes ring true to Fawcett's accounts. It had
even been suggested that the character of Lord John Roxton,
the career big-game hunter-explorer, was based on Fawcett.
Yet, compared with Roraima, which is easily accessible
by adventure tourists, the table mountains of the Brazil-Bolivia
border have scarcely been explored. The area is said to
be visually stunning. Robin Hanbury-Tennison, the founder
of Survival International, who passed close by in 1962 described
2000ft cliffs amid a mosaic of savannah, swamp
and primary tropical forest. Wildlife is abundant.
The full range of Amazonian forest and savannah fauna is
present (the Bolivian side is the country's largest National
park. The Brazilian side is an ecological reserve).
Close to the mountains is the old capital of Mato Grosso
state, Vila Bela da Santissima Trinidade, once a
booming gold-mining town that was abandoned abruptly
following the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1888. Both
Fawcett and, later, Hanbury-Tennison, described the deserted
city inhabited by just a few hundred descendants of the
Negro slaves who worked the mines. Fawcett rummaged through
the grown-over cathedral there and removed the bishop's
throne which he later had restored in England. He left it
anonymously at the Brompton Oratory in London as it gave
his wife 'mysterious maladies'. If possible, we aim
to find out what became of the chair.
