The Lost World

Well, I finished the book two days ago, guess it's time to blog about it.

The story opens as our main char., Edward Malone, is talking to the woman he wants to be his girlfriend, Gladys. When he asks what he could do to help her to love him, she says that he should go on an adventure.

While attending a zoological meeting for his newspaper, Prof. Challenger reasserts the claim that ruined his credibility-the existance of prehistoric animals on a plataeu in the Amazon jungle. To disprove his claim once and for all, the rest of the zoologists offer to gather a party to check on the claim, asking for volunteers.

Malone (who will send letters to the newspaper about the expedition), Prof. Summerlee (who hotly contested Challenger's claims), and Lord John Roxton (a famous explorer and hunter) accept.

A few days later, they set off for the jungle, Challenger giving them a letter to be opened at noon in a certain town in Brazil. They uneventfully go to that town, and open the letter, seeing a blank sheet of paper. After some speculation, Challenger joins them, saying he had intended to be there before they opened it, but was delayed.

Picking up two half-breeds, a large black man named Zambo, and two natives who were there during Challenger's first expedition, they make their way to the plataeu. Nearly inaccessable (as it curves outward), they make it to the top by tipping over a large beech on a nearby, climbable, pinnacle. Unfortunately, the half-breeds, who were related to a slaver Roxton once killed, push the beech down, stranding them. Their only communication is with Zambo, who has remained faithful (the natives went back to their village).

They make a small camp and begin to explore the island. About a week after they were stranded, Malone decides to go to the Central Lake, which they had seen from a large tree above their camp, to explore in the dead of night.

After coming back, he discovers his companions and food gone, and a pool of blood. After a day of searching, a beaten-up Roxton finds him, and tells him that they were abducted by ape-men, and were going to be thrown onto bamboo stakes at the bottom of the plataeu. Using their guns, they save Summerlee, Challenger, and several natives (who are at eternal war with the ape-men) from the village, and return the natives to their cave-village.

Leading an assault on the ape men, they wipe the males out, eliminating the species.

One of the natives they saved, who turns out to be the chief's son, gives them a map to a small hole in the caves that they can use to descend the plataeu.

Returning to England, Challenger proves his claims by presenting a live pterodactyl (which escapes) that they had captured.

Malone, going to Gladys' house, finds she has married a clerk.

In Roxton's house, we discover that he had found diamonds, all together worth 200,000 pounds, on the plataeu. Challenger plans to open a museum with his share, Summerlee to quit teaching to study fossils, and Roxton and Malone to return to the plataeu with a better-equipped group.

My opinions:

Certainly worth the read. It was very good, quick paced, and full of twists and turns.

My earlier comparison was rather incorrect, and it turned out this book is set on a volcanic plataeu, not a valley.

Unfortunately, it is also rather impossible for anything of the like to be true, with so many satellite pictures and the like of the area.

I was also surprised that Gladys had already married the other man, as it went far against what she said earlier in the book, and Malone had been gone for no more than a year, which seems like to little a time to get married to someone you have (hopefully) only been with for so short a time.