Crossover of the Week

1940

THE DEVIL’S NEST 

            The jungle lord Ki-Gor joins an expedition to the valley known as the Devil’s Nest to find Brendan Barnes, the American heir to a great fortune. Barnes tells the group that his family has been associated for years with the Jellyby Foundation in London, and therefore received regular reports on the Foundation’s work in Borrioboola-Gha and other parts of Africa. One of Ki-Gor’s traveling companions, Dr. John Moore of MI6’s Department Q, refers to an expedition funded by a patron of the Royal Geographic Society to a nearby valley where a dinosaur allegedly exists: “Too close a follower of that old crackpot Challenger, I suppose...This is the Congo, not some cloud-shrouded neverland like Maple White Land.”

            Short story by Duane Spurlock in Jungle Tales, Volume 1, Ron Fortier, ed., Airship 27 Productions, 2012. Ki-Gor the jungle lord’s adventures were originally chronicled by several authors using the pen name “John Peter Drummond” in Jungle Stories from 1939 to 1954. In Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Mrs. Jellyby is a self-styled philanthropist who tries to ship downtrodden Britishers off to the African colony of Borrioboola-Gha so that they and the natives can earn money through coffee growing. Moore is wrong about the dinosaur in the valley, and he is also wrong about Professor George Edward Challenger not having actually discovered Maple White Land, as his discovery of the plateau was recounted in Edward Malone’s account (edited by Arthur Conan Doyle) entitled The Lost World.