My First 'Lost World': The Spinechilling Book of Monsters (Rupert Matthews, 1988) and the Mystery of the Giant Toad

 

Probably my earliest memory of knowing anything about Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was reading about it in The Spinechilling Book of Monsters by Rupert Matthews. I borrowed this book out of the library over and over and over again. It cover monsters from folklore, mythology, and cryptozoology, as well as monsters from books and movies.

It gives a brief description of storyline of The Lost World along with a few striking illustrations (image libraries are credited but not artists, so I don't know who drew these - does anyone out there recognise the style?)

The caption here reads, 'The explorers in the novel The Lost World come across aggressive pterodactyls and a huge, warty toad.' And so, for years, I believed that in The Lost World, there was a giant, horrible, bloody-mouthed terror toad as one of the primary antagonists: entirely because of this caption, and this illustration.

I finally came across a copy of the novel when I was about 13 at a friend's house (Penguin classics edition). And while I was utterly blown away by it ... where was the giant toad? Nowhere to be seen!

In the chapter 'For Once I Was The Hero,' the Challenger expedition are attacked by a carnivorous animal during the night. They only get a brief glimpse of its face when Lord John Roxton thrusts a flaming torch at it:

For one moment I had a vision of a horrible mask like a giant toad’s, of a warty, leprous skin, and of a loose mouth all beslobbered with fresh blood.

Especially with the note of the blood-slobbered mouth, this indeed looks like what the illustrator had in mind. But only a few paragraphs later, we learn that the professors have decided that what attacked them was some kind of carnivorous dinosaur, though they disagree as to whether it was most likely a Megalosaurus or an Allosaurus. It's worth noting here that by 1912, when the novel was written, Conan Doyle would have been well aware of the current thinking regarding these animals: that they were theropods (two-legged). The days of the squat, quadrupedal Crystal Palace Megalosaurs was long gone.

Malone, the young journalist and narrator, has one more encounter with this dangerous creature when he is chased by it through the jungle. Again, this occurs at night, and he does not get a good look at it. In any case, Malone has no specific paleontological knowledge, and he is without the learned professors when this occurs.

Finally, at the end of the story, when the expedition has won the freedom of the prehistoric plateau by defeating the villainous ape-men, they learn of a creature the plateau's inhabitants call the Stoa. In the chapter 'Our Eyes Have Seen Great Wonders,' Malone reports:

... two of those frightful monsters which had disturbed our camp and pursued me upon my solitary journey. In shape they were like horrible toads, and moved in a succession of springs, but in size they were of an incredible bulk, larger than the largest elephant. We had never before seen them save at night, and indeed they are nocturnal animals save when disturbed in their lairs, as these had been. We now stood amazed at the sight, for their blotched and warty skins were of a curious fish-like iridescence, and the sunlight struck them with an ever-varying rainbow bloom as they moved.

While it is quite clear that Conan Doyle intends these animals to be bipedal dinosaurs (or at lest semi-bipedal), and illustrators have shown them as such ever since the original 1912 Strand magazine illustrations by Harry Rowntree, he does repeatedly use toad imagery to describe them. It's not surprising really that the illustrator of The Spinechilling Book of Monsters thought that Conan Doyle intended the Stoa to be, in fact, monstrous, bloody-mouthed toads.

As for the notion that the Stoa were based on real cryptozoological animals from an actual lost plateau in South America, brought to Conan Doyle's attention by explorer Percy Fawcett ... well, that will have to wait for an upcoming episode on the podcast.