The Lost World

From there The Lost World climbs toward a plateau in the Amazon where the ordinary laws of nature seem to have been suspended, and creatures long thought extinct still browse and take wing. Challenger claims to have seen them. Almost no one believes him. So a party sets out to prove or disprove it: the volcanic Challenger, his sardonic rival Professor Summerlee, the aristocratic hunter Lord John Roxton, and young Malone, who leaps to his feet and volunteers before he has quite decided to. Roxton, for his part, asks only for "the great waste lands and the wide spaces, with a gun in my fist."

Conan Doyle writes it with a wonderful double vision: the wonder of iguanodons gambolling like kangaroos, and the comedy of two feuding scientists forgetting themselves to clasp hands in silent awe at the sight. There is real danger on that pyramidal rock beneath its lone tree, and real wit at every turn: a gruff red-headed editor, a warning wife, a bridge felled across a gorge.

It's an adventure that keeps faith with its own opening question: what a person will risk to become someone worth loving. The plateau waits, walled and green and impossible, and the door across the chasm stands open only for as long as it takes to cross.