When a promising setting doesn’t provide inspiration – Elizabeth Kay
The book that really captured my imagination as a child was The Lost World , by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. It mentions blank spaces on maps – imagine! There actually was a time when the word Unexplored was commonplace. The Romans and mediaeval cartographers used to write Hic sunt leones (here be lions) , for unknown territories. There’s one instance of Hic sunt dracones (here be dragons) on The Hunt-Lenox Globe, which dates from about 1510. So what was that about – Komodo dragons, or fossilised dinosaur bones? Hunted by Elizabeth Kay I was into dinosaurs long before they became popular – in fact, I don’t think my mother even knew what they were. Someone had given me a book called Animal Life of the World , a 1930s compilation full of wonderful chapter headings such as Death Dealers of the Deep, Queer Servants of Man and Hunters of the Air . And there, amongst them, Big Game of Other Days. Clay models, photographed in black and white and resembling over-endowed rhinoceroses...