What ho once again,
It’s a busy life being a gentleman adventurer indeed, what with the production of Sir Terry Pratchett’s “Guards! Guards!” culminating last week in four performances in Durham’s Assembly Rooms. It was a lot of fun and also raised something like £1800 for the orang-utan foundation, a charity that is working to protect, yes, you guessed it, orang-utans! For those of you that missed it it did feature myself in a rather dashing hat! (More on that soon!)
Unfortunately my top hat, due to be featured in “Rate My Hat!”, was roped into the production and has gone walkabouts. Have no fear though, I shall hunt it down! This I Vow. Then the day of hat related etiquette fun will go ahead!
Thanks to the marvels of modern technology I have been able to come across the original papers that Mr Everard im Thurn and Mr Harry Inness Perkins presented to the royal geographical society in 1885. This account was what inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to write the classic adventure, “The Lost World”. Their accounts detail canoeing up the Potaro river, great waterfalls, sinking canoes, a variety of Indian tribes (Arekuna Indians – “good men and true”, Makusi Indians – “hospitable, obliging and generous”), Lonk “one of the finest and best Indians I have ever met”, swarms of sand flies, enchanting jasper bedded streams, a mysterious abandoned village and their rival Mr Siedl. Not to mention their ascent of Mt Roraima.
“The first impression was one of inability mentally to grasp such surroundings; the next that one was entering on some strange country of nightmares for which an appropriate and wildly fantastic landscape had been formed, some dreadful and stormy day, when, in their mid career, the broken and chaotic clouds had been stiffened in a single instant into stone.”
Mr im Thurn was clearly a gentleman adventurer as this quote from his trekking through the jungle clearly illustrates.
“… overhead, hang down numberless coiled and looped and tangled branches of trees, each ready to catch around the neck of the walker or at least, to sweep of his hat causing him to stop, to his great discomfort and the disturbance of his many burdens.”
Remove a gentleman adventurer’s hat and your just asking for trouble!
Back soon with details on my quest to recover my hat and on what the money being raised will be used for!
Yours truly,
Alistair Linsell- Gentleman Adventurer!
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