The Heat of the Amazon Was Always in her Blood

For a man who never set foot there, South America seemed to exert an unusual degree of influence over Conan Doyle’s imagination. His great post-imperial romance The Lost World was his most sustained exploration – in every sense of the word – of the imagined continent, and much can be read into his decision to locate a dinosaur-inhabited plateau in the centre of the Amazonian rainforest. For the British explorers under the leadership of Professor Challenger who set off in search of evidence of prehistoric life in the modern age, the interior of Brazil is one of the last remaining blank spaces on the map: only in such unexplored terrain can prehistory survive, untroubled by the twentieth century. The blank space exerts an irresistible appeal over the Challenger expedition, which comprises men who long to add to the world’s knowledge, to their own celebrity and to their own wealth (they discover diamonds, inconveniently located in the lair of some particularly aggressive pterodactyls).