The Lost World of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle — the tabletop mountain that inspired the novel, a 2,800m plateau shared between Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana, cloud forests and carnivorous plants on the summit, and the longest uninterrupted cliff face in South America
Mount Roraima (tepui — the Pemon word for 'house of the gods', the flat-topped sandstone table mountains of the Guiana Highlands) is the highest and most iconic of the approximately 115 tepuis that rise above the Venezuelan Gran Sabana (Great Savanna) plateau in the Canaima National Park (UNESCO World Heritage Site, 30,000 sq km, the sixth-largest national park in the world). Roraima's summit plateau (2,810m) is a world apart from the surrounding savanna: the triple-border meeting point of Venezuela, Brazil, and Guyana (marked by a cairn in the summit's central plateau), the plateau receives…
Roraima was first summited in 1884 by Everard im Thurn and Harry Perkins (British colonial botanists collecting for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, ascending from British Guiana via the Pakaraima route). Arthur Conan Doyle read im Thurn's account of the summit plateau's isolated ecosystem and used it as the basis for The Lost World (1912) — the novel featuring Professor Challenger's expedition to a South American plateau where prehistoric animals had survived in isolation. The Pemon indigenous people (the Cariban-speaking indigenous nation of the Gran Sabana, who have inhabited the tepui…