Lost in the Lost World

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Se?ora Esmeralda was a vast, round woman, sitting in the gutter on an upturned bucket, languidly peeling potatoes. Yes, she had heard of Kawaik, but she told me it was about 100 miles away. She even had a radio-but she didn't know Kawaik's frequency. Nor did she care. Waving her hand about her ears as if she was brushing off flies, she told me to stop bothering her.

'It's not my job to help you!' she proclaimed, accurately enough.

Over in the 'plaza,' an open-air bar attracted a dozen miners playing dominoes; they had scales to weigh their glistening specks of ore for bets. The road to Kawaik was so bad-torrential rains regularly washed it bare-that two drunken truck drivers refused to risk their vehicle on it. 'Maybe for $1,000,' they chortled. There would be no more scheduled flights for a week. At least.

The tepuis sat on the horizon, indifferent as the pyramids. Nothing moved in the heat, not even a bird. And the sign in front of me read: WELCOME TO ICABARU-GATEWAY TO FRIENDSHIP.

Ah, the Lost World.

In a sense I could trace this whole debacle-and the world's long-running fascination with the region-back to a lecture given in London 110 years ago by a Welsh botanist, Everard Im Thurn. Mr. Im Thurn was the first European scientist to scale a tepui, and his findings caused a minor sensation. On the damp plateau of Mount Roraima, he'd found dozens of plant and insect species that had evolved in isolation from the rainforest below. The tepuis were 'islands in time,' as isolated as the Gal?pagos.

Sitting in the audience was the omnivorous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Some 25 years later, the lecture became the basis of his classic adventure novel The Lost World-in which a scientific expedition climbs a Venezuelan tepui, only to find the surface inhabited by dinosaurs, passed over by evolution. A hokey parable of social Darwinism it may be, but Venezuelans knew a good marketing ploy when they heard it. Sometime in the 1960s, they began routinely referring to their border region-which is properly called Gran Sabana-as 'El Mundo Perdido.' Today travel groups merrily head down to the village of Canaima, a sort of tourist summer camp, for flyovers of Angel Falls.

And yet the whole region is also one of the more volatile in South America, and not just because the borders are unenforceable, encouraging Brazilian and Venezuelan air force fighters to strafe one another's outposts at irregular intervals. The now familiar cast of South American Indians, hard-bitten miners, righteous missionaries, ranchers and environmentalists is locked in hidden battles where the principle of survival of the fittest is more pitiless than anything Conan Doyle ever dreamed up.

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