Roger Casement and Edmund Dene Morel soon reappeared in Conan Doyle's universe in literary form. They served him as real-life models for participants in a fictional expedition that sought to prove the existence of a “lost world” in South America, located on a high plateau on which dinosaurs supposedly had survived. The degree to which a fictional portrait that transforms human rights activists into dinosaur hunters is politically incorrect is also what marks the length of the shadow cast upon the Congo book. While photography was used to bring to light the horrors of the regime of Leopold II, now it served to establish the plausibility of a more than just remarkable discovery: the preservation of an era long thought to have disappeared in the middle of an ancient forest. Dinosaurs could now not only be reconstructed from fossils, as had occurred since the middle of the nineteenth century with ever advanced methods, but they could also be seen in the flesh, according to this narrative conjecture. The past is the present, and even within that there exist different layers of time as well. One nevertheless needs neither the theory of atavism nor Sherlock Holmes's art of interpreting signs in order to reanimate the past, but instead one need only penetrate the wilderness deeply enough. What awaited there were really fruitful, photographic hunting grounds. These had been the goal of Conan Doyle's essays in the British Journal of Photography. Therefore photographs have their role here as well, their meaning for the shape of the book and its particular program now being more significant. In this regard it is notable that photographs are not only mentioned in the text but also used as illustrations in the various editions. As archival materials show, Conan Doyle oversaw the work on photographs and drawings in a highly personal manner, and he also made extensive suggestions. The illustrations were clearly a constitutive part of the novel's project right from the beginning.