HEN I READ A NOVEL like Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, a vivid setting is often constructed in my head, an environment that not only facilitates the story and offers milieu to the characters, but that also lives and breathes on its own. As I have the habit of reading in bed, I usually drift off to sleep clinging to fleeting fragments that I want –oh so much– to make real.

And then, someone lets me know that they are real.

From The Seoul Times: An Unearthly Plateau in Venezuela, which presents a unique travelogue with ACD’s The Lost World as an ever-present point of reference:

Seven years later, Everard Im Thurn and Harry Perkins made a successful ascent of Roraima, an ancient 9,219-foot sandstone mesa towering above the tropical rain forest and savanna. Im Thurn’s colorful account is believed to have partly inspired Conan Doyle’s 1912 sci-fi novel “The Lost World,” about a Jurassic Park-like plateau roiling with prehistoric beasts.