The Mountain

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. In the book, the group climbed a spire of rock that stood slightly apart from the main rock wall. At the top, they felled the one tree that grew there, using it as a bridge to clamber across. Just like in the story, we came to a rock pinnacle. 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. At one point, DJ slipped and started a landslide which nearly took me with it. We reached a ledge where the cliff divided into two horizontal bands, separated by a steep, jungle-covered slope and pulled ourselves up a tree trunk one at a time. At some point, the realization hit that we were above the second layer. We saw daylight ahead, then the hint of a view. I clambered over some boulders and found myself on top of the world: The Lost World. Elation and vertigo, a feeling like a film camera, trained on me, was traversing a full 360-degree arc.

We spent the next two days crossing the plateau, trekking first through open woodland and grassy plains then through bamboo thickets. Tough machete work; our water ran out. We dipped into a ravine that wound between rocky spurs, found a stream, following it as it grew. Above us, vultures rode the thermals, leathery headed and easy to imagine as pterodactyls. But though we found tracks-of tapir, anteater and jaguar, the only animals that showed themselves were a trio of collared peccary wild boar which hurried away as we sloshed through the stream behind them. In the Lost World novel, all the water on the plateau drains inward to a central lake where the explorers find plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs and huge prehistoric turtles. There are no waterfalls like Jatoba falls. There should be. The stream which we had followed, quite suddenly opened out and dropped 248 meters. We can state that height with some certainty because Badu and the porters measured it by tying three fishing lines together and lowering a bag filled with stone over the edge.

We stayed at the top of the falls for three nights before making our way back down. This was to experience the spectacle of each sunset when thousands of swifts would dive down the waterfall. They would start by gathering above the cliff edge, massing like starlings in winter, then at some imperceptible signal, swooping down all at once. We stood at the edge as the birds zipped past our heads.

The next day, we climbed down a partly closed-over trail down. At the bottom, we were greeted by a scene that we all felt should have been in the Lost World novel. The canyon, which Jatoba falls had eroded backward, narrowed to a vertical crack in the rock little more than two or three arm-spans in width. The gap was flooded with clear, cold water and extended into the rock for hundreds of feet before regaining full sunlight again. We left our rucksacks at the entrance and swum our way in. As a child I used to watch a cartoon on TV called 'Valley of the Dinosaurs'. To me, this was the same place.