Land of The Lost (1974 TV Series) Geography and Technology - The Lost City

The Lost City

The Lost City is an ancient subterranean city originally built by the Altrusians but now inhabited by the Sleestak and partly abandoned. It is built into the base of a mountain in a region of the Land separated from the rest by a narrow but deep chasm; a fallen stone slab bridging the chasm is the only convenient method of access. Externally, it consists of a huge plaza with an arched entrance, crumbling rectangular pillars, and three tunnel entrances set into a mountainside. The plaza is the home territory of an allosaurus. The Marshalls dub this allosaurus "Big Alice", but the Sleestak call her "Selima", which means "Protector", because she keeps animals away from their eggs.

The left entrance to the City leads to the Devil's Cauldron lava pool, along corridors with many stone alcoves used by the Sleestak for hibernation. Accessible through the central entrance is a fog-filled pit at least seven meters deep called the "Hole of No Return," within which lives a carnivorous beast the Sleestak refer to as their god, to which they sacrifice people and animals as food. Sleestak legend tells that only once did someone escape from the Hole, but the legend doesn't detail how; one possible route is via a narrow tunnel that runs from the bottom of the pit to the top, too small for the god to pass through and normally hidden by fog.

Also through the central entrance is a passage to a chamber containing a crystal matrix table, where Enik spends most of his time attempting to open a time doorway back to his original era. Near this room is a door with a Pylon key next to it, beyond which is a small opening that leads to a bottomless pit. In the episode "Elsewhen", Holly descends into this pit on a rope, and she briefly finds herself hanging in the sky under an upside-down Land of the Lost. This bizarre vision is never explained within the show, but may be related to the closed nature of the universe that the Land is in; just as the river loops back to its origin, the pit may descend so far that it comes out in the sky overhead. (In Dorothy Fontana's script this is confirmed as the scene is specifically described as the chasm being upside down and that the light that suddenly shines on Holly is from the rising sun.)

Although the Sleestak occasionally venture beyond the chasm above ground (The Sleestak God, The Stranger, The Hole, Circle, etc.), there are caves and tunnels all over the underground of the Land, many of which link to the Lost City. The Sleestak sometimes use these tunnels to hunt, chipping upward to create a pit trap and waiting below for prey to fall in.

A pristine version of the Lost City - presumably from the time of the Altrusians, and marked by structures which no longer exist - is briefly seen in both "Pylon Express" and "The Longest Day".

The 2009 movie incarnation of the Lost City is drastically different yet still has the original series' plot of being an Altrusian City once. The Library of Skulls surrounds the "Hole of No Return," with the Sleestak "god" was rewritten for the movie as a magma pool at the bottom of the pit.