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THE LOST WORLD I have wrought my simple plan
If I give one hour of joy To the boy who's half a man,
Or the man who's half a boy.
The Lost World By SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
Foreword Mr. E. D. Malone desires to state that both
the injunction for restraint and the libel action have been withdrawn unreservedly by
Professor G. E. Challenger, who, being
satisfied that no criticism or comment in this book is meant in an offensive spirit,
has guaranteed that he will place no impediment to its publication and
circulation.
Chapter I "There Are Heroisms All Round Us"
Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth,--a fluffy,
feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely
centered upon his own silly self.
If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of
such a father-in-law.
I am convinced that he really believed in his heart that I came round to the
Chestnuts three days a week for the pleasure of his company, and very
especially to hear his views upon
bimetallism, a subject upon which he was by way of being an authority.
For an hour or more that evening I listened to his monotonous chirrup about bad money
driving out good, the token value of silver, the depreciation of the rupee, and
the true standards of exchange.
"Suppose," he cried with feeble violence, "that all the debts in the world were
called up simultaneously, and immediate payment insisted upon,--what under our
present conditions would happen then?"
I gave the self-evident answer that I should be a ruined man, upon which he
jumped from his chair, reproved me for my habitual levity, which made it impossible
for him to discuss any reasonable subject
in my presence, and bounced off out of the room to dress for a Masonic meeting.
At last I was alone with Gladys, and the moment of Fate had come!
All that evening I had felt like the soldier who awaits the signal which will
send him on a forlorn hope; hope of victory and fear of repulse alternating in his
mind.
She sat with that proud, delicate profile of hers outlined against the red curtain.
How beautiful she was! And yet how aloof!
We had been friends, quite good friends; but never could I get beyond the same
comradeship which I might have established with one of my fellow-reporters upon the
Gazette,--perfectly frank, perfectly kindly, and perfectly unsexual.
My instincts are all against a woman being too frank and at her ease with me.
It is no compliment to a man.
Where the real sex feeling begins, timidity and distrust are its companions, heritage
from old wicked days when love and violence went often hand in hand.
The bent head, the averted eye, the faltering voice, the wincing figure--these,
and not the unshrinking gaze and frank reply, are the true signals of passion.
Even in my short life I had learned as much as that--or had inherited it in that race
memory which we call instinct. Gladys was full of every womanly quality.
Some judged her to be cold and hard; but such a thought was treason.
That delicately bronzed skin, almost oriental in its coloring, that raven hair,
the large liquid eyes, the full but exquisite lips,--all the stigmata of
passion were there.
But I was sadly conscious that up to now I had never found the secret of drawing it
forth.
However, come what might, I should have done with suspense and bring matters to a
head to-night. She could but refuse me, and better be a
repulsed lover than an accepted brother.
So far my thoughts had carried me, and I was about to break the long and uneasy
silence, when two critical, dark eyes looked round at me, and the proud head was
shaken in smiling reproof.
"I have a presentiment that you are going to propose, Ned.
I do wish you wouldn't; for things are so much nicer as they are."
I drew my chair a little nearer.
"Now, how did you know that I was going to propose?"
I asked in genuine wonder. "Don't women always know?
Do you suppose any woman in the world was ever taken unawares?
But--oh, Ned, our friendship has been so good and so pleasant!
What a pity to spoil it!
Don't you feel how splendid it is that a young man and a young woman should be able
to talk face to face as we have talked?" "I don't know, Gladys.
You see, I can talk face to face with--with the station-master."
I can't imagine how that official came into the matter; but in he trotted, and set us
both laughing.
"That does not satisfy me in the least. I want my arms round you, and your head on
my breast, and--oh, Gladys, I want----"
She had sprung from her chair, as she saw signs that I proposed to demonstrate some
of my wants. "You've spoiled everything, Ned," she said.
"It's all so beautiful and natural until this kind of thing comes in!
It is such a pity! Why can't you control yourself?"
"I didn't invent it," I pleaded.
"It's nature. It's love."
"Well, perhaps if both love, it may be different.
I have never felt it."
"But you must--you, with your beauty, with your soul!
Oh, Gladys, you were made for love! You must love!"
"One must wait till it comes."
"But why can't you love me, Gladys? Is it my appearance, or what?"
She did unbend a little.
She put forward a hand--such a gracious, stooping attitude it was--and she pressed
back my head. Then she looked into my upturned face with
a very wistful smile.
"No it isn't that," she said at last. "You're not a conceited boy by nature, and
so I can safely tell you it is not that. It's deeper."
"My character?"
She nodded severely. "What can I do to mend it?
Do sit down and talk it over. No, really, I won't if you'll only sit
down!"
She looked at me with a wondering distrust which was much more to my mind than her
whole-hearted confidence.
How primitive and *** it looks when you put it down in black and white!--and
perhaps after all it is only a feeling peculiar to myself.
Anyhow, she sat down.
"Now tell me what's amiss with me?" "I'm in love with somebody else," said she.
It was my turn to jump out of my chair.
"It's nobody in particular," she explained, laughing at the expression of my face:
"only an ideal. I've never met the kind of man I mean."
"Tell me about him.
What does he look like?" "Oh, he might look very much like you."
"How dear of you to say that! Well, what is it that he does that I don't
do?
Just say the word,--teetotal, vegetarian, aeronaut, theosophist, superman.
I'll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will only give me an idea what would please
you."
She laughed at the elasticity of my character.
"Well, in the first place, I don't think my ideal would speak like that," said she.
"He would be a harder, sterner man, not so ready to adapt himself to a silly girl's
whim.
But, above all, he must be a man who could do, who could act, who could look Death in
the face and have no fear of him, a man of great deeds and strange experiences.
It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had won; for they
would be reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton!
When I read his wife's life of him I could so understand her love!
And Lady Stanley! Did you ever read the wonderful last
These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul, and yet be
Chapter of that book about her husband?
the greater, not the less, on account of her love, honored by all the world as the
inspirer of noble deeds."
She looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm that I nearly brought down the whole level
of the interview. I gripped myself hard, and went on with the
argument.
"We can't all be Stanleys and Burtons," said I; "besides, we don't get the chance,-
-at least, I never had the chance. If I did, I should try to take it."
"But chances are all around you.
It is the mark of the kind of man I mean that he makes his own chances.
You can't hold him back. I've never met him, and yet I seem to know
him so well.
There are heroisms all round us waiting to be done.
It's for men to do them, and for women to reserve their love as a reward for such
men.
Look at that young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon.
It was blowing a gale of wind; but because he was announced to go he insisted on
starting.
The wind blew him fifteen hundred miles in twenty-four hours, and he fell in the
middle of Russia. That was the kind of man I mean.
Think of the woman he loved, and how other women must have envied her!
That's what I should like to be,--envied for my man."
"I'd have done it to please you."
"But you shouldn't do it merely to please me.
You should do it because you can't help yourself, because it's natural to you,
because the man in you is crying out for heroic expression.
Now, when you described the Wigan coal explosion last month, could you not have
gone down and helped those people, in spite of the choke-damp?"
"I did."
"You never said so." "There was nothing worth bucking about."
"I didn't know." She looked at me with rather more interest.
"That was brave of you."
"I had to. If you want to write good copy, you must be
where the things are." "What a prosaic motive!
It seems to take all the romance out of it.
But, still, whatever your motive, I am glad that you went down that mine."
She gave me her hand; but with such sweetness and dignity that I could only
stoop and kiss it.
"I dare say I am merely a foolish woman with a young girl's fancies.
And yet it is so real with me, so entirely part of my very self, that I cannot help
acting upon it.
If I marry, I do want to marry a famous man!"
"Why should you not?" I cried.
"It is women like you who brace men up.
Give me a chance, and see if I will take it!
Besides, as you say, men ought to MAKE their own chances, and not wait until they
are given.
Look at Clive--just a clerk, and he conquered India!
By George! I'll do something in the world yet!"
She laughed at my sudden Irish effervescence.
"Why not?" she said. "You have everything a man could have,--
youth, health, strength, education, energy.
I was sorry you spoke. And now I am glad--so glad--if it wakens
these thoughts in you!" "And if I do----"
Her dear hand rested like warm velvet upon my lips.
"Not another word, Sir!
You should have been at the office for evening duty half an hour ago; only I
hadn't the heart to remind you.
Some day, perhaps, when you have won your place in the world, we shall talk it over
again."
And so it was that I found myself that foggy November evening pursuing the
Camberwell tram with my heart glowing within me, and with the eager determination
that not another day should elapse before I
should find some deed which was worthy of my lady.
But who--who in all this wide world could ever have imagined the incredible shape
which that deed was to take, or the strange steps by which I was led to the doing of
it?
And, after all, this opening chapter will seem to the reader to have nothing to do
with my narrative; and yet there would have been no narrative without it, for it is
only when a man goes out into the world
with the thought that there are heroisms all round him, and with the desire all
alive in his heart to follow any which may come within sight of him, that he breaks
away as I did from the life he knows, and
ventures forth into the wonderful mystic twilight land where lie the great
adventures and the great rewards.
Behold me, then, at the office of the Daily Gazette, on the staff of which I was a most
insignificant unit, with the settled determination that very night, if possible,
to find the quest which should be worthy of my Gladys!
Was it hardness, was it selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her
own glorification?
Such thoughts may come to middle age; but never to ardent three-and-twenty in the
fever of his first love.
>
Chapter II "Try Your Luck with Professor Challenger"
I always liked McArdle, the crabbed, old, round-backed, red-headed news editor, and I
rather hoped that he liked me.
Of course, Beaumont was the real boss; but he lived in the rarefied atmosphere of some
Olympian height from which he could distinguish nothing smaller than an
international crisis or a split in the Cabinet.
Sometimes we saw him passing in lonely majesty to his inner sanctum, with his eyes
staring vaguely and his mind hovering over the Balkans or the Persian Gulf.
He was above and beyond us.
But McArdle was his first lieutenant, and it was he that we knew.
The old man nodded as I entered the room, and he pushed his spectacles far up on his
bald forehead.
"Well, Mr. Malone, from all I hear, you seem to be doing very well," said he in his
kindly Scotch accent. I thanked him.
"The colliery explosion was excellent.
So was the Southwark fire. You have the true descreeptive touch.
What did you want to see me about?" "To ask a favor."
He looked alarmed, and his eyes shunned mine.
"Tut, tut! What is it?"
"Do you think, Sir, that you could possibly send me on some mission for the paper?
I would do my best to put it through and get you some good copy."
"What sort of meesion had you in your mind, Mr. Malone?"
"Well, Sir, anything that had adventure and danger in it.
I really would do my very best.
The more difficult it was, the better it would suit me."
"You seem very anxious to lose your life." "To justify my life, Sir."
"Dear me, Mr. Malone, this is very--very exalted.
I'm afraid the day for this sort of thing is rather past.
The expense of the 'special meesion' business hardly justifies the result, and,
of course, in any case it would only be an experienced man with a name that would
command public confidence who would get such an order.
The big blank spaces in the map are all being filled in, and there's no room for
romance anywhere.
Wait a bit, though!" he added, with a sudden smile upon his face.
"Talking of the blank spaces of the map gives me an idea.
What about exposing a fraud--a modern Munchausen--and making him rideeculous?
You could show him up as the liar that he is!
Eh, man, it would be fine.
How does it appeal to you?" "Anything--anywhere--I care nothing."
McArdle was plunged in thought for some minutes.
"I wonder whether you could get on friendly--or at least on talking terms with
the fellow," he said, at last.
"You seem to have a sort of genius for establishing relations with people--
seempathy, I suppose, or animal magnetism, or youthful vitality, or something.
I am conscious of it myself."
"You are very good, sir." "So why should you not try your luck with
Professor Challenger, of Enmore Park?" I dare say I looked a little startled.
"Challenger!"
I cried. "Professor Challenger, the famous
zoologist! Wasn't he the man who broke the skull of
Blundell, of the Telegraph?"
The news editor smiled grimly. "Do you mind?
Didn't you say it was adventures you were after?"
"It is all in the way of business, sir," I answered.
"Exactly. I don't suppose he can always be so violent
as that.
I'm thinking that Blundell got him at the wrong moment, maybe, or in the wrong
fashion. You may have better luck, or more tact in
handling him.
There's something in your line there, I am sure, and the Gazette should work it."
"I really know nothing about him," said I.
"I only remember his name in connection with the police-court proceedings, for
striking Blundell." "I have a few notes for your guidance, Mr.
Malone.
I've had my eye on the Professor for some little time."
He took a paper from a drawer. "Here is a summary of his record.
I give it you briefly:--
"'Challenger, George Edward. Born: Largs, N. B., 1863.
Educ.: Largs Academy; Edinburgh University. British Museum Assistant, 1892.
Assistant-Keeper of Comparative Anthropology Department, 1893.
Resigned after acrimonious correspondence same year.
Winner of Crayston Medal for Zoological Research.
Foreign Member of'--well, quite a lot of things, about two inches of small type--
'Societe Belge, American Academy of Sciences, La Plata, etc., etc.
Ex-President Palaeontological Society.
Section H, British Association'--so on, so on!--'Publications: "Some Observations Upon
a Series of Kalmuck Skulls"; "Outlines of Vertebrate Evolution"; and numerous papers,
including "The underlying fallacy of
Weissmannism," which caused heated discussion at the Zoological Congress of
Vienna. Recreations: Walking, Alpine climbing.
Address: Enmore Park, Kensington, W.'
"There, take it with you. I've nothing more for you to-night."
I pocketed the slip of paper.
"One moment, sir," I said, as I realized that it was a pink bald head, and not a red
face, which was fronting me. "I am not very clear yet why I am to
interview this gentleman.
What has he done?" The face flashed back again.
"Went to South America on a solitary expedeetion two years ago.
Came back last year.
Had undoubtedly been to South America, but refused to say exactly where.
Began to tell his adventures in a vague way, but somebody started to pick holes,
and he just shut up like an oyster.
Something wonderful happened--or the man's a champion liar, which is the more probable
supposeetion. Had some damaged photographs, said to be
fakes.
Got so touchy that he assaults anyone who asks questions, and heaves reporters down
the stairs. In my opinion he's just a homicidal
megalomaniac with a turn for science.
That's your man, Mr. Malone. Now, off you run, and see what you can make
of him. You're big enough to look after yourself.
Anyway, you are all safe.
Employers' Liability Act, you know." A grinning red face turned once more into a
pink oval, fringed with gingery fluff; the interview was at an end.
I walked across to the Savage Club, but instead of turning into it I leaned upon
the railings of Adelphi Terrace and gazed thoughtfully for a long time at the brown,
oily river.
I can always think most sanely and clearly in the open air.
I took out the list of Professor Challenger's exploits, and I read it over
under the electric lamp.
Then I had what I can only regard as an inspiration.
As a Pressman, I felt sure from what I had been told that I could never hope to get
into touch with this cantankerous Professor.
But these recriminations, twice mentioned in his skeleton biography, could only mean
that he was a fanatic in science. Was there not an exposed margin there upon
which he might be accessible?
I would try. I entered the club.
It was just after eleven, and the big room was fairly full, though the rush had not
yet set in.
I noticed a tall, thin, angular man seated in an arm-chair by the fire.
He turned as I drew my chair up to him.
It was the man of all others whom I should have chosen--Tarp Henry, of the staff of
Nature, a thin, dry, leathery creature, who was full, to those who knew him, of kindly
humanity.
I plunged instantly into my subject. "What do you know of Professor Challenger?"
"Challenger?" He gathered his brows in scientific
disapproval.
"Challenger was the man who came with some ***-and-bull story from South America."
"What story?" "Oh, it was rank nonsense about some ***
animals he had discovered.
I believe he has retracted since. Anyhow, he has suppressed it all.
He gave an interview to Reuter's, and there was such a howl that he saw it wouldn't do.
It was a discreditable business.
There were one or two folk who were inclined to take him seriously, but he soon
choked them off." "How?"
"Well, by his insufferable rudeness and impossible behavior.
There was poor old Wadley, of the Zoological Institute.
Wadley sent a message: 'The President of the Zoological Institute presents his
compliments to Professor Challenger, and would take it as a personal favor if he
would do them the honor to come to their next meeting.'
The answer was unprintable." "You don't say?"
"Well, a bowdlerized version of it would run: 'Professor Challenger presents his
compliments to the President of the Zoological Institute, and would take it as
a personal favor if he would go to the devil.'"
"Good Lord!" "Yes, I expect that's what old Wadley said.
I remember his wail at the meeting, which began: 'In fifty years experience of
scientific intercourse----' It quite broke the old man up."
"Anything more about Challenger?"
"Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter
microscope.
I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked
eye.
I'm a frontiersman from the extreme edge of the Knowable, and I feel quite out of place
when I leave my study and come into touch with all you great, rough, hulking
creatures.
I'm too detached to talk scandal, and yet at scientific conversaziones I HAVE heard
something of Challenger, for he is one of those men whom nobody can ignore.
He's as clever as they make 'em--a full- charged battery of force and vitality, but
a quarrelsome, ill-conditioned faddist, and unscrupulous at that.
He had gone the length of faking some photographs over the South American
business." "You say he is a faddist.
What is his particular fad?"
"He has a thousand, but the latest is something about Weissmann and Evolution.
He had a fearful row about it in Vienna, I believe."
"Can't you tell me the point?"
"Not at the moment, but a translation of the proceedings exists.
We have it filed at the office. Would you care to come?"
"It's just what I want.
I have to interview the fellow, and I need some lead up to him.
It's really awfully good of you to give me a lift.
I'll go with you now, if it is not too late."
Half an hour later I was seated in the newspaper office with a huge tome in front
of me, which had been opened at the article "Weissmann versus Darwin," with the sub
heading, "Spirited Protest at Vienna.
Lively Proceedings."
My scientific education having been somewhat neglected, I was unable to follow
the whole argument, but it was evident that the English Professor had handled his
subject in a very aggressive fashion, and
had thoroughly annoyed his Continental colleagues.
"Protests," "Uproar," and "General appeal to the Chairman" were three of the first
brackets which caught my eye.
Most of the matter might have been written in Chinese for any definite meaning that it
conveyed to my brain.
"I wish you could translate it into English for me," I said, pathetically, to my help-
mate. "Well, it is a translation."
"Then I'd better try my luck with the original."
"It is certainly rather deep for a layman."
"If I could only get a single good, meaty sentence which seemed to convey some sort
of definite human idea, it would serve my turn.
Ah, yes, this one will do.
I seem in a vague way almost to understand it.
I'll copy it out. This shall be my link with the terrible
Professor."
"Nothing else I can do?" "Well, yes; I propose to write to him.
If I could frame the letter here, and use your address it would give atmosphere."
"We'll have the fellow round here making a row and breaking the furniture."
"No, no; you'll see the letter--nothing contentious, I assure you."
"Well, that's my chair and desk.
You'll find paper there. I'd like to censor it before it goes."
It took some doing, but I flatter myself that it wasn't such a bad job when it was
finished.
I read it aloud to the critical bacteriologist with some pride in my
handiwork.
"DEAR PROFESSOR CHALLENGER," it said, "As a humble student of Nature, I have always
taken the most profound interest in your speculations as to the differences between
Darwin and Weissmann.
I have recently had occasion to refresh my memory by re-reading----"
"You infernal liar!" murmured Tarp Henry. --"by re-reading your masterly address at
Vienna.
That lucid and admirable statement seems to be the last word in the matter.
There is one sentence in it, however-- namely: 'I protest strongly against the
insufferable and entirely dogmatic assertion that each separate id is a
microcosm possessed of an historical
architecture elaborated slowly through the series of generations.'
Have you no desire, in view of later research, to modify this statement?
Do you not think that it is over- accentuated?
With your permission, I would ask the favor of an interview, as I feel strongly upon
the subject, and have certain suggestions which I could only elaborate in a personal
conversation.
With your consent, I trust to have the honor of calling at eleven o'clock the day
after to-morrow (Wednesday) morning. "I remain, Sir, with assurances of profound
respect, yours very truly,
EDWARD D. MALONE." "How's that?"
I asked, triumphantly. "Well if your conscience can stand it----"
"It has never failed me yet."
"But what do you mean to do?" "To get there.
Once I am in his room I may see some opening.
I may even go the length of open confession.
If he is a sportsman he will be tickled." "Tickled, indeed!
He's much more likely to do the tickling.
Chain mail, or an American football suit-- that's what you'll want.
Well, good-bye.
I'll have the answer for you here on Wednesday morning--if he ever deigns to
answer you.
He is a violent, dangerous, cantankerous character, hated by everyone who comes
across him, and the butt of the students, so far as they dare take a liberty with
him.
Perhaps it would be best for you if you never heard from the fellow at all."
>
Chapter III "He is a Perfectly Impossible Person"
My friend's fear or hope was not destined to be realized.
When I called on Wednesday there was a letter with the West Kensington postmark
upon it, and my name scrawled across the envelope in a handwriting which looked like
a barbed-wire railing.
The contents were as follows:-- "ENMORE PARK, W.
"SIR,--I have duly received your note, in which you claim to endorse my views,
although I am not aware that they are dependent upon endorsement either from you
or anyone else.
You have ventured to use the word 'speculation' with regard to my statement
upon the subject of Darwinism, and I would call your attention to the fact that such a
word in such a connection is offensive to a degree.
The context convinces me, however, that you have sinned rather through ignorance and
tactlessness than through malice, so I am content to pass the matter by.
You quote an isolated sentence from my lecture, and appear to have some difficulty
in understanding it.
I should have thought that only a sub-human intelligence could have failed to grasp the
point, but if it really needs amplification I shall consent to see you at the hour
named, though visits and visitors of every sort are exceeding distasteful to me.
As to your suggestion that I may modify my opinion, I would have you know that it is
not my habit to do so after a deliberate expression of my mature views.
You will kindly show the envelope of this letter to my man, Austin, when you call, as
he has to take every precaution to shield me from the intrusive rascals who call
themselves 'journalists.'
"Yours faithfully, "GEORGE EDWARD CHALLENGER."
This was the letter that I read aloud to Tarp Henry, who had come down early to hear
the result of my venture.
His only remark was, "There's some new stuff, cuticura or something, which is
better than arnica." Some people have such extraordinary notions
of humor.
It was nearly half-past ten before I had received my message, but a taxicab took me
round in good time for my appointment.
It was an imposing porticoed house at which we stopped, and the heavily-curtained
windows gave every indication of wealth upon the part of this formidable Professor.
The door was opened by an odd, swarthy, dried-up person of uncertain age, with a
dark pilot jacket and brown leather gaiters.
I found afterwards that he was the chauffeur, who filled the gaps left by a
succession of fugitive butlers. He looked me up and down with a searching
light blue eye.
"Expected?" he asked. "An appointment."
"Got your letter?" I produced the envelope.
"Right!"
He seemed to be a person of few words. Following him down the passage I was
suddenly interrupted by a small woman, who stepped out from what proved to be the
dining-room door.
She was a bright, vivacious, dark-eyed lady, more French than English in her type.
"One moment," she said. "You can wait, Austin.
Step in here, sir.
May I ask if you have met my husband before?"
"No, madam, I have not had the honor." "Then I apologize to you in advance.
I must tell you that he is a perfectly impossible person--absolutely impossible.
If you are forewarned you will be the more ready to make allowances."
"It is most considerate of you, madam."
"Get quickly out of the room if he seems inclined to be violent.
Don't wait to argue with him. Several people have been injured through
doing that.
Afterwards there is a public scandal and it reflects upon me and all of us.
I suppose it wasn't about South America you wanted to see him?"
I could not lie to a lady.
"Dear me! That is his most dangerous subject.
You won't believe a word he says--I'm sure I don't wonder.
But don't tell him so, for it makes him very violent.
Pretend to believe him, and you may get through all right.
Remember he believes it himself.
Of that you may be assured. A more honest man never lived.
Don't wait any longer or he may suspect.
If you find him dangerous--really dangerous--ring the bell and hold him off
until I come. Even at his worst I can usually control
him."
With these encouraging words the lady handed me over to the taciturn Austin, who
had waited like a bronze statue of discretion during our short interview, and
I was conducted to the end of the passage.
There was a tap at a door, a bull's bellow from within, and I was face to face with
the Professor.
He sat in a rotating chair behind a broad table, which was covered with books, maps,
and diagrams. As I entered, his seat spun round to face
me.
His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but
not for so overpowering a personality as this.
It was his size which took one's breath away--his size and his imposing presence.
His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being.
I am sure that his top-hat, had I ever ventured to don it, would have slipped over
me entirely and rested on my shoulders.
He had the face and beard which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid,
the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and
rippling down over his chest.
The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his
massive forehead.
The eyes were blue-gray under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very
masterful.
A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which
appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black
hair.
This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the
notorious Professor Challenger. "Well?" said he, with a most insolent
stare.
"What now?" I must keep up my deception for at least a
little time longer, otherwise here was evidently an end of the interview.
"You were good enough to give me an appointment, sir," said I, humbly,
producing his envelope. He took my letter from his desk and laid it
out before him.
"Oh, you are the young person who cannot understand plain English, are you?
My general conclusions you are good enough to approve, as I understand?"
"Entirely, sir--entirely!"
I was very emphatic. "Dear me!
That strengthens my position very much, does it not?
Your age and appearance make your support doubly valuable.
Well, at least you are better than that herd of swine in Vienna, whose gregarious
grunt is, however, not more offensive than the isolated effort of the British hog."
He glared at me as the present representative of the beast.
"They seem to have behaved abominably," said I.
"I assure you that I can fight my own battles, and that I have no possible need
of your sympathy. Put me alone, sir, and with my back to the
wall.
G. E. C. is happiest then. Well, sir, let us do what we can to curtail
this visit, which can hardly be agreeable to you, and is inexpressibly irksome to me.
You had, as I have been led to believe, some comments to make upon the proposition
which I advanced in my thesis." There was a brutal directness about his
methods which made evasion difficult.
I must still make play and wait for a better opening.
It had seemed simple enough at a distance. Oh, my Irish wits, could they not help me
now, when I needed help so sorely?
He transfixed me with two sharp, steely eyes.
"Come, come!" he rumbled.
"I am, of course, a mere student," said I, with a fatuous smile, "hardly more, I might
say, than an earnest inquirer.
At the same time, it seemed to me that you were a little severe upon Weissmann in this
matter.
Has not the general evidence since that date tended to--well, to strengthen his
position?" "What evidence?"
He spoke with a menacing calm.
"Well, of course, I am aware that there is not any what you might call DEFINITE
evidence.
I alluded merely to the trend of modern thought and the general scientific point of
view, if I might so express it." He leaned forward with great earnestness.
"I suppose you are aware," said he, checking off points upon his fingers, "that
the cranial index is a constant factor?" "Naturally," said I.
"And that telegony is still sub judice?"
"Undoubtedly." "And that the germ plasm is different from
the parthenogenetic egg?" "Why, surely!"
I cried, and gloried in my own audacity.
"But what does that prove?" he asked, in a gentle, persuasive voice.
"Ah, what indeed?" I murmured.
"What does it prove?"
"Shall I tell you?" he cooed. "Pray do."
"It proves," he roared, with a sudden blast of fury, "that you are the damnedest
imposter in London--a vile, crawling journalist, who has no more science than he
has decency in his composition!"
He had sprung to his feet with a mad rage in his eyes.
Even at that moment of tension I found time for amazement at the discovery that he was
quite a short man, his head not higher than my shoulder--a stunted Hercules whose
tremendous vitality had all run to depth, breadth, and brain.
"Gibberish!" he cried, leaning forward, with his fingers on the table and his face
projecting.
"That's what I have been talking to you, sir--scientific gibberish!
Did you think you could match cunning with me--you with your walnut of a brain?
You think you are omnipotent, you infernal scribblers, don't you?
That your praise can make a man and your blame can break him?
We must all bow to you, and try to get a favorable word, must we?
This man shall have a leg up, and this man shall have a dressing down!
Creeping vermin, I know you!
You've got out of your station. Time was when your ears were clipped.
You've lost your sense of proportion. Swollen gas-bags!
I'll keep you in your proper place.
Yes, sir, you haven't got over G. E. C. There's one man who is still your master.
He warned you off, but if you WILL come, by the Lord you do it at your own risk.
Forfeit, my good Mr. Malone, I claim forfeit!
You have played a rather dangerous game, and it strikes me that you have lost it."
"Look here, sir," said I, backing to the door and opening it; "you can be as abusive
as you like. But there is a limit.
You shall not assault me."
"Shall I not?" He was slowly advancing in a peculiarly
menacing way, but he stopped now and put his big hands into the side-pockets of a
rather boyish short jacket which he wore.
"I have thrown several of you out of the house.
You will be the fourth or fifth. Three pound fifteen each--that is how it
averaged.
Expensive, but very necessary. Now, sir, why should you not follow your
brethren? I rather think you must."
He resumed his unpleasant and stealthy advance, pointing his toes as he walked,
like a dancing master. I could have bolted for the hall door, but
it would have been too ignominious.
Besides, a little glow of righteous anger was springing up within me.
I had been hopelessly in the wrong before, but this man's menaces were putting me in
the right.
"I'll trouble you to keep your hands off, sir.
I'll not stand it." "Dear me!"
His black moustache lifted and a white fang twinkled in a sneer.
"You won't stand it, eh?" "Don't be such a fool, Professor!"
I cried.
"What can you hope for? I'm fifteen stone, as hard as nails, and
play center three-quarter every Saturday for the London Irish.
I'm not the man----"
It was at that moment that he rushed me. It was lucky that I had opened the door, or
we should have gone through it. We did a Catharine-wheel together down the
passage.
Somehow we gathered up a chair upon our way, and bounded on with it towards the
street.
My mouth was full of his beard, our arms were locked, our bodies intertwined, and
that infernal chair radiated its legs all round us.
The watchful Austin had thrown open the hall door.
We went with a back somersault down the front steps.
I have seen the two Macs attempt something of the kind at the halls, but it appears to
take some practise to do it without hurting oneself.
The chair went to matchwood at the bottom, and we rolled apart into the gutter.
He sprang to his feet, waving his fists and wheezing like an asthmatic.
"Had enough?" he panted.
"You infernal bully!" I cried, as I gathered myself together.
Then and there we should have tried the thing out, for he was effervescing with
fight, but fortunately I was rescued from an odious situation.
A policeman was beside us, his notebook in his hand.
"What's all this? You ought to be ashamed" said the
policeman.
It was the most rational remark which I had heard in Enmore Park.
"Well," he insisted, turning to me, "what is it, then?"
"This man attacked me," said I.
"Did you attack him?" asked the policeman. The Professor breathed hard and said
nothing. "It's not the first time, either," said the
policeman, severely, shaking his head.
"You were in trouble last month for the same thing.
You've blackened this young man's eye. Do you give him in charge, sir?"
I relented.
"No," said I, "I do not." "What's that?" said the policeman.
"I was to blame myself. I intruded upon him.
He gave me fair warning."
The policeman snapped up his notebook. "Don't let us have any more such goings-
on," said he. "Now, then!
Move on, there, move on!"
This to a butcher's boy, a maid, and one or two loafers who had collected.
He clumped heavily down the street, driving this little flock before him.
The Professor looked at me, and there was something humorous at the back of his eyes.
"Come in!" said he. "I've not done with you yet."
The speech had a sinister sound, but I followed him none the less into the house.
The man-servant, Austin, like a wooden image, closed the door behind us.
>
Chapter IV "It's Just the very Biggest Thing in the
World"
Hardly was it shut when Mrs. Challenger darted out from the dining-room.
The small woman was in a furious temper. She barred her husband's way like an
enraged chicken in front of a bulldog.
It was evident that she had seen my exit, but had not observed my return.
"You brute, George!" she screamed. "You've hurt that nice young man."
He *** backwards with his thumb.
"Here he is, safe and sound behind me." She was confused, but not unduly so.
"I am so sorry, I didn't see you." "I assure you, madam, that it is all
right."
"He has marked your poor face! Oh, George, what a brute you are!
Nothing but scandals from one end of the week to the other.
Everyone hating and making fun of you.
You've finished my patience. This ends it."
"Dirty linen," he rumbled. "It's not a secret," she cried.
"Do you suppose that the whole street--the whole of London, for that matter---- Get
away, Austin, we don't want you here. Do you suppose they don't all talk about
you?
Where is your dignity? You, a man who should have been Regius
Professor at a great University with a thousand students all revering you.
Where is your dignity, George?"
"How about yours, my dear?" "You try me too much.
A ruffian--a common brawling ruffian-- that's what you have become."
"Be good, Jessie."
"A roaring, raging bully!" "That's done it!
Stool of penance!" said he.
To my amazement he stooped, picked her up, and placed her sitting upon a high pedestal
of black marble in the angle of the hall. It was at least seven feet high, and so
thin that she could hardly balance upon it.
A more absurd object than she presented cocked up there with her face convulsed
with anger, her feet dangling, and her body rigid for fear of an upset, I could not
imagine.
"Let me down!" she wailed. "Say 'please.'"
"You brute, George! Let me down this instant!"
"Come into the study, Mr. Malone."
"Really, sir----!" said I, looking at the lady.
"Here's Mr. Malone pleading for you, Jessie.
Say 'please,' and down you come."
"Oh, you brute! Please! please!"
He took her down as if she had been a canary.
"You must behave yourself, dear.
Mr. Malone is a Pressman. He will have it all in his rag to-morrow,
and sell an extra dozen among our neighbors.
'Strange story of high life'--you felt fairly high on that pedestal, did you not?
Then a sub-title, 'Glimpse of a singular menage.'
He's a foul feeder, is Mr. Malone, a carrion eater, like all of his kind--porcus
ex grege diaboli--a swine from the devil's herd.
That's it, Malone--what?"
"You are really intolerable!" said I, hotly.
He bellowed with laughter.
"We shall have a coalition presently," he boomed, looking from his wife to me and
puffing out his enormous chest. Then, suddenly altering his tone, "Excuse
this frivolous family badinage, Mr. Malone.
I called you back for some more serious purpose than to mix you up with our little
domestic pleasantries. Run away, little woman, and don't fret."
He placed a huge hand upon each of her shoulders.
"All that you say is perfectly true.
I should be a better man if I did what you advise, but I shouldn't be quite George
Edward Challenger. There are plenty of better men, my dear,
but only one G. E. C.
So make the best of him." He suddenly gave her a resounding kiss,
which embarrassed me even more than his violence had done.
"Now, Mr. Malone," he continued, with a great accession of dignity, "this way, if
YOU please." We re-entered the room which we had left so
tumultuously ten minutes before.
The Professor closed the door carefully behind us, motioned me into an arm-chair,
and pushed a cigar-box under my nose. "Real San Juan Colorado," he said.
"Excitable people like you are the better for narcotics.
Heavens! don't bite it! Cut--and cut with reverence!
Now lean back, and listen attentively to whatever I may care to say to you.
If any remark should occur to you, you can reserve it for some more opportune time.
"First of all, as to your return to my house after your most justifiable
expulsion"--he protruded his beard, and stared at me as one who challenges and
invites contradiction--"after, as I say, your well-merited expulsion.
The reason lay in your answer to that most officious policeman, in which I seemed to
discern some glimmering of good feeling upon your part--more, at any rate, than I
am accustomed to associate with your profession.
In admitting that the fault of the incident lay with you, you gave some evidence of a
certain mental detachment and breadth of view which attracted my favorable notice.
The sub-species of the human race to which you unfortunately belong has always been
below my mental horizon. Your words brought you suddenly above it.
You swam up into my serious notice.
For this reason I asked you to return with me, as I was minded to make your further
acquaintance.
You will kindly deposit your ash in the small Japanese tray on the bamboo table
which stands at your left elbow." All this he boomed forth like a professor
addressing his class.
He had swung round his revolving chair so as to face me, and he sat all puffed out
like an enormous bull-frog, his head laid back and his eyes half-covered by
supercilious lids.
Now he suddenly turned himself sideways, and all I could see of him was tangled hair
with a red, protruding ear. He was scratching about among the litter of
papers upon his desk.
He faced me presently with what looked like a very tattered sketch-book in his hand.
"I am going to talk to you about South America," said he.
"No comments if you please.
First of all, I wish you to understand that nothing I tell you now is to be repeated in
any public way unless you have my express permission.
That permission will, in all human probability, never be given.
Is that clear?" "It is very hard," said I.
"Surely a judicious account----"
He replaced the notebook upon the table. "That ends it," said he.
"I wish you a very good morning." "No, no!"
I cried.
"I submit to any conditions. So far as I can see, I have no choice."
"None in the world," said he. "Well, then, I promise."
"Word of honor?"
"Word of honor." He looked at me with doubt in his insolent
eyes. "After all, what do I know about your
honor?" said he.
"Upon my word, sir," I cried, angrily, "you take very great liberties!
I have never been so insulted in my life." He seemed more interested than annoyed at
my outbreak.
"Round-headed," he muttered. "Brachycephalic, gray-eyed, black-haired,
with suggestion of the negroid. Celtic, I presume?"
"I am an Irishman, sir."
"Irish Irish?" "Yes, sir."
"That, of course, explains it. Let me see; you have given me your promise
that my confidence will be respected?
That confidence, I may say, will be far from complete.
But I am prepared to give you a few indications which will be of interest.
In the first place, you are probably aware that two years ago I made a journey to
South America--one which will be classical in the scientific history of the world?
The object of my journey was to verify some conclusions of Wallace and of Bates, which
could only be done by observing their reported facts under the same conditions in
which they had themselves noted them.
If my expedition had no other results it would still have been noteworthy, but a
curious incident occurred to me while there which opened up an entirely fresh line of
inquiry.
"You are aware--or probably, in this half- educated age, you are not aware--that the
country round some parts of the Amazon is still only partially explored, and that a
great number of tributaries, some of them
entirely uncharted, run into the main river.
It was my business to visit this little- known back-country and to examine its
fauna, which furnished me with the materials for several chapters for that
great and monumental work upon zoology which will be my life's justification.
I was returning, my work accomplished, when I had occasion to spend a night at a small
Indian village at a point where a certain tributary--the name and position of which I
withhold--opens into the main river.
The natives were Cucama Indians, an amiable but degraded race, with mental powers
hardly superior to the average Londoner.
I had effected some cures among them upon my way up the river, and had impressed them
considerably with my personality, so that I was not surprised to find myself eagerly
awaited upon my return.
I gathered from their signs that someone had urgent need of my medical services, and
I followed the chief to one of his huts.
When I entered I found that the sufferer to whose aid I had been summoned had that
instant expired.
He was, to my surprise, no Indian, but a white man; indeed, I may say a very white
man, for he was flaxen-haired and had some characteristics of an albino.
He was clad in rags, was very emaciated, and bore every trace of prolonged hardship.
So far as I could understand the account of the natives, he was a complete stranger to
them, and had come upon their village through the woods alone and in the last
stage of exhaustion.
"The man's knapsack lay beside the couch, and I examined the contents.
His name was written upon a tab within it-- Maple White, Lake Avenue, Detroit,
Michigan.
It is a name to which I am prepared always to lift my hat.
It is not too much to say that it will rank level with my own when the final credit of
this business comes to be apportioned.
"From the contents of the knapsack it was evident that this man had been an artist
and poet in search of effects. There were scraps of verse.
I do not profess to be a judge of such things, but they appeared to me to be
singularly wanting in merit.
There were also some rather commonplace pictures of river scenery, a paint-box, a
box of colored chalks, some brushes, that curved bone which lies upon my inkstand, a
volume of Baxter's 'Moths and Butterflies,' a cheap revolver, and a few cartridges.
Of personal equipment he either had none or he had lost it in his journey.
Such were the total effects of this strange American Bohemian.
"I was turning away from him when I observed that something projected from the
front of his ragged jacket.
It was this sketch-book, which was as dilapidated then as you see it now.
Indeed, I can assure you that a first folio of Shakespeare could not be treated with
greater reverence than this relic has been since it came into my possession.
I hand it to you now, and I ask you to take it page by page and to examine the
contents."
He helped himself to a cigar and leaned back with a fiercely critical pair of eyes,
taking note of the effect which this document would produce.
I had opened the volume with some expectation of a revelation, though of what
nature I could not imagine.
The first page was disappointing, however, as it contained nothing but the picture of
a very fat man in a pea-jacket, with the legend, "Jimmy Colver on the Mail-boat,"
written beneath it.
There followed several pages which were filled with small sketches of Indians and
their ways.
Then came a picture of a cheerful and corpulent ecclesiastic in a shovel hat,
sitting opposite a very thin European, and the inscription: "Lunch with Fra
Cristofero at Rosario."
Studies of women and babies accounted for several more pages, and then there was an
unbroken series of animal drawings with such explanations as "Manatee upon
Sandbank," "Turtles and Their Eggs," "Black
Ajouti under a Miriti Palm"--the matter disclosing some sort of pig-like animal;
and finally came a double page of studies of long-snouted and very unpleasant
saurians.
I could make nothing of it, and said so to the Professor.
"Surely these are only crocodiles?" "Alligators!
Alligators!
There is hardly such a thing as a true crocodile in South America.
The distinction between them----" "I meant that I could see nothing unusual--
nothing to justify what you have said."
He smiled serenely. "Try the next page," said he.
I was still unable to sympathize.
It was a full-page sketch of a landscape roughly tinted in color--the kind of
painting which an open-air artist takes as a guide to a future more elaborate effort.
There was a pale-green foreground of feathery vegetation, which sloped upwards
and ended in a line of cliffs dark red in color, and curiously ribbed like some
basaltic formations which I have seen.
They extended in an unbroken wall right across the background.
At one point was an isolated pyramidal rock, crowned by a great tree, which
appeared to be separated by a cleft from the main crag.
Behind it all, a blue tropical sky.
A thin green line of vegetation fringed the summit of the ruddy cliff.
"Well?" he asked.
"It is no doubt a curious formation," said I "but I am not geologist enough to say
that it is wonderful." "Wonderful!" he repeated.
"It is unique.
It is incredible. No one on earth has ever dreamed of such a
possibility. Now the next."
I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise.
There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever
seen.
It was the wild dream of an *** smoker, a vision of delirium.
The head was like that of a fowl, the body that of a bloated lizard, the trailing tail
was furnished with upward-turned spikes, and the curved back was edged with a high
serrated fringe, which looked like a dozen ***' wattles placed behind each other.
In front of this creature was an absurd mannikin, or dwarf, in human form, who
stood staring at it.
"Well, what do you think of that?" cried the Professor, rubbing his hands with an
air of triumph. "It is monstrous--grotesque."
"But what made him draw such an animal?"
"Trade gin, I should think." "Oh, that's the best explanation you can
give, is it?" "Well, sir, what is yours?"
"The obvious one that the creature exists.
That is actually sketched from the life." I should have laughed only that I had a
vision of our doing another Catharine-wheel down the passage.
"No doubt," said I, "no doubt," as one humors an imbecile.
"I confess, however," I added, "that this tiny human figure puzzles me.
If it were an Indian we could set it down as evidence of some pigmy race in America,
but it appears to be a European in a sun- hat."
The Professor snorted like an angry buffalo.
"You really touch the limit," said he. "You enlarge my view of the possible.
Cerebral paresis!
Mental inertia! Wonderful!"
He was too absurd to make me angry.
Indeed, it was a waste of energy, for if you were going to be angry with this man
you would be angry all the time. I contented myself with smiling wearily.
"It struck me that the man was small," said I.
"Look here!" he cried, leaning forward and dabbing a great hairy sausage of a finger
on to the picture.
"You see that plant behind the animal; I suppose you thought it was a dandelion or a
Brussels sprout--what? Well, it is a vegetable ivory palm, and
they run to about fifty or sixty feet.
Don't you see that the man is put in for a purpose?
He couldn't really have stood in front of that brute and lived to draw it.
He sketched himself in to give a scale of heights.
He was, we will say, over five feet high. The tree is ten times bigger, which is what
one would expect."
"Good heavens!" I cried.
"Then you think the beast was---- Why, Charing Cross station would hardly make a
kennel for such a brute!"
"Apart from exaggeration, he is certainly a well-grown specimen," said the Professor,
complacently.
"But," I cried, "surely the whole experience of the human race is not to be
set aside on account of a single sketch"--I had turned over the leaves and ascertained
that there was nothing more in the book--"a
single sketch by a wandering American artist who may have done it under hashish,
or in the delirium of fever, or simply in order to gratify a freakish imagination.
You can't, as a man of science, defend such a position as that."
For answer the Professor took a book down from a shelf.
"This is an excellent monograph by my gifted friend, Ray Lankester!" said he.
"There is an illustration here which would interest you.
Ah, yes, here it is!
The inscription beneath it runs: 'Probable appearance in life of the Jurassic Dinosaur
Stegosaurus. The hind leg alone is twice as tall as a
full-grown man.'
Well, what do you make of that?" He handed me the open book.
I started as I looked at the picture.
In this reconstructed animal of a dead world there was certainly a very great
resemblance to the sketch of the unknown artist.
"That is certainly remarkable," said I.
"But you won't admit that it is final?" "Surely it might be a coincidence, or this
American may have seen a picture of the kind and carried it in his memory.
It would be likely to recur to a man in a delirium."
"Very good," said the Professor, indulgently; "we leave it at that.
I will now ask you to look at this bone."
He handed over the one which he had already described as part of the dead man's
possessions.
It was about six inches long, and thicker than my thumb, with some indications of
dried cartilage at one end of it. "To what known creature does that bone
belong?" asked the Professor.
I examined it with care and tried to recall some half-forgotten knowledge.
"It might be a very thick human collar- bone," I said.
My companion waved his hand in contemptuous deprecation.
"The human collar-bone is curved. This is straight.
There is a groove upon its surface showing that a great tendon played across it, which
could not be the case with a clavicle." "Then I must confess that I don't know what
it is."
"You need not be ashamed to expose your ignorance, for I don't suppose the whole
South Kensington staff could give a name to it."
He took a little bone the size of a bean out of a pill-box.
"So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in
your hand.
That will give you some idea of the size of the creature.
You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent.
What do you say to that?"
"Surely in an elephant----" He winced as if in pain.
"Don't! Don't talk of elephants in South America.
Even in these days of Board schools----"
"Well," I interrupted, "any large South American animal--a tapir, for example."
"You may take it, young man, that I am versed in the elements of my business.
This is not a conceivable bone either of a tapir or of any other creature known to
zoology.
It belongs to a very large, a very strong, and, by all analogy, a very fierce animal
which exists upon the face of the earth, but has not yet come under the notice of
science.
You are still unconvinced?" "I am at least deeply interested."
"Then your case is not hopeless.
I feel that there is reason lurking in you somewhere, so we will patiently grope round
for it. We will now leave the dead American and
proceed with my narrative.
You can imagine that I could hardly come away from the Amazon without probing deeper
into the matter. There were indications as to the direction
from which the dead traveler had come.
Indian legends would alone have been my guide, for I found that rumors of a strange
land were common among all the riverine tribes.
You have heard, no doubt, of Curupuri?"
"Never." "Curupuri is the spirit of the woods,
something terrible, something malevolent, something to be avoided.
None can describe its shape or nature, but it is a word of terror along the Amazon.
Now all tribes agree as to the direction in which Curupuri lives.
It was the same direction from which the American had come.
Something terrible lay that way. It was my business to find out what it
was."
"What did you do?" My flippancy was all gone.
This massive man compelled one's attention and respect.
"I overcame the extreme reluctance of the natives--a reluctance which extends even to
talk upon the subject--and by judicious persuasion and gifts, aided, I will admit,
by some threats of coercion, I got two of them to act as guides.
After many adventures which I need not describe, and after traveling a distance
which I will not mention, in a direction which I withhold, we came at last to a
tract of country which has never been
described, nor, indeed, visited save by my unfortunate predecessor.
Would you kindly look at this?" He handed me a photograph--half-plate size.
"The unsatisfactory appearance of it is due to the fact," said he, "that on descending
the river the boat was upset and the case which contained the undeveloped films was
broken, with disastrous results.
Nearly all of them were totally ruined--an irreparable loss.
This is one of the few which partially escaped.
This explanation of deficiencies or abnormalities you will kindly accept.
There was talk of faking. I am not in a mood to argue such a point."
The photograph was certainly very off- colored.
An unkind critic might easily have misinterpreted that dim surface.
It was a dull gray landscape, and as I gradually deciphered the details of it I
realized that it represented a long and enormously high line of cliffs exactly like
an immense cataract seen in the distance,
with a sloping, tree-clad plain in the foreground.
"I believe it is the same place as the painted picture," said I.
"It is the same place," the Professor answered.
"I found traces of the fellow's camp. Now look at this."
It was a nearer view of the same scene, though the photograph was extremely
defective.
I could distinctly see the isolated, tree- crowned pinnacle of rock which was detached
from the crag. "I have no doubt of it at all," said I.
"Well, that is something gained," said he.
"We progress, do we not? Now, will you please look at the top of
that rocky pinnacle? Do you observe something there?"
"An enormous tree."
"But on the tree?" "A large bird," said I.
He handed me a lens. "Yes," I said, peering through it, "a large
bird stands on the tree.
It appears to have a considerable beak. I should say it was a pelican."
"I cannot congratulate you upon your eyesight," said the Professor.
"It is not a pelican, nor, indeed, is it a bird.
It may interest you to know that I succeeded in shooting that particular
specimen.
It was the only absolute proof of my experiences which I was able to bring away
with me." "You have it, then?"
Here at last was tangible corroboration.
"I had it. It was unfortunately lost with so much else
in the same boat accident which ruined my photographs.
I clutched at it as it disappeared in the swirl of the rapids, and part of its wing
was left in my hand.
I was insensible when washed ashore, but the miserable remnant of my superb specimen
was still intact; I now lay it before you."
From a drawer he produced what seemed to me to be the upper portion of the wing of a
large bat.
It was at least two feet in length, a curved bone, with a membranous veil beneath
it. "A monstrous bat!"
I suggested.
"Nothing of the sort," said the Professor, severely.
"Living, as I do, in an educated and scientific atmosphere, I could not have
conceived that the first principles of zoology were so little known.
Is it possible that you do not know the elementary fact in comparative anatomy,
that the wing of a bird is really the forearm, while the wing of a bat consists
of three elongated fingers with membranes between?
Now, in this case, the bone is certainly not the forearm, and you can see for
yourself that this is a single membrane hanging upon a single bone, and therefore
that it cannot belong to a bat.
But if it is neither bird nor bat, what is it?"
My small stock of knowledge was exhausted. "I really do not know," said I.
He opened the standard work to which he had already referred me.
"Here," said he, pointing to the picture of an extraordinary flying monster, "is an
excellent reproduction of the dimorphodon, or pterodactyl, a flying reptile of the
Jurassic period.
On the next page is a diagram of the mechanism of its wing.
Kindly compare it with the specimen in your hand."
A wave of amazement passed over me as I looked.
I was convinced. There could be no getting away from it.
The cumulative proof was overwhelming.
The sketch, the photographs, the narrative, and now the actual specimen--the evidence
was complete. I said so--I said so warmly, for I felt
that the Professor was an ill-used man.
He leaned back in his chair with drooping eyelids and a tolerant smile, basking in
this sudden gleam of sunshine.
"It's just the very biggest thing that I ever heard of!" said I, though it was my
journalistic rather than my scientific enthusiasm that was roused.
"It is colossal.
You are a Columbus of science who has discovered a lost world.
I'm awfully sorry if I seemed to doubt you. It was all so unthinkable.
But I understand evidence when I see it, and this should be good enough for anyone."
The Professor purred with satisfaction. "And then, sir, what did you do next?"
"It was the wet season, Mr. Malone, and my stores were exhausted.
I explored some portion of this huge cliff, but I was unable to find any way to scale
it.
The pyramidal rock upon which I saw and shot the pterodactyl was more accessible.
Being something of a cragsman, I did manage to get half way to the top of that.
From that height I had a better idea of the plateau upon the top of the crags.
It appeared to be very large; neither to east nor to west could I see any end to the
vista of green-capped cliffs.
Below, it is a swampy, jungly region, full of snakes, insects, and fever.
It is a natural protection to this singular country."
"Did you see any other trace of life?"
"No, sir, I did not; but during the week that we lay encamped at the base of the
cliff we heard some very strange noises from above."
"But the creature that the American drew?
How do you account for that?" "We can only suppose that he must have made
his way to the summit and seen it there. We know, therefore, that there is a way up.
We know equally that it must be a very difficult one, otherwise the creatures
would have come down and overrun the surrounding country.
Surely that is clear?"
"But how did they come to be there?" "I do not think that the problem is a very
obscure one," said the Professor; "there can only be one explanation.
South America is, as you may have heard, a granite continent.
At this single point in the interior there has been, in some far distant age, a great,
sudden volcanic upheaval.
These cliffs, I may remark, are basaltic, and therefore plutonic.
An area, as large perhaps as Sussex, has been lifted up en bloc with all its living
contents, and cut off by perpendicular precipices of a hardness which defies
erosion from all the rest of the continent.
What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of Nature are
suspended.
The various checks which influence the struggle for existence in the world at
large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise
disappear.
You will observe that both the pterodactyl and the stegosaurus are Jurassic, and
therefore of a great age in the order of life.
They have been artificially conserved by those strange accidental conditions."
"But surely your evidence is conclusive. You have only to lay it before the proper
authorities."
"So in my simplicity, I had imagined," said the Professor, bitterly.
"I can only tell you that it was not so, that I was met at every turn by
incredulity, born partly of stupidity and partly of jealousy.
It is not my nature, sir, to cringe to any man, or to seek to prove a fact if my word
has been doubted.
After the first I have not condescended to show such corroborative proofs as I
possess. The subject became hateful to me--I would
not speak of it.
When men like yourself, who represent the foolish curiosity of the public, came to
disturb my privacy I was unable to meet them with dignified reserve.
By nature I am, I admit, somewhat fiery, and under provocation I am inclined to be
violent. I fear you may have remarked it."
I nursed my eye and was silent.
"My wife has frequently remonstrated with me upon the subject, and yet I fancy that
any man of honor would feel the same.
To-night, however, I propose to give an extreme example of the control of the will
over the emotions. I invite you to be present at the
exhibition."
He handed me a card from his desk.
"You will perceive that Mr. Percival Waldron, a naturalist of some popular
repute, is announced to lecture at eight- thirty at the Zoological Institute's Hall
upon 'The Record of the Ages.'
I have been specially invited to be present upon the platform, and to move a vote of
thanks to the lecturer.
While doing so, I shall make it my business, with infinite tact and delicacy,
to throw out a few remarks which may arouse the interest of the audience and cause some
of them to desire to go more deeply into the matter.
Nothing contentious, you understand, but only an indication that there are greater
deeps beyond.
I shall hold myself strongly in leash, and see whether by this self-restraint I attain
a more favorable result." "And I may come?"
I asked eagerly.
"Why, surely," he answered, cordially. He had an enormously massive genial manner,
which was almost as overpowering as his violence.
His smile of benevolence was a wonderful thing, when his cheeks would suddenly bunch
into two red apples, between his half- closed eyes and his great black beard.
"By all means, come.
It will be a comfort to me to know that I have one ally in the hall, however
inefficient and ignorant of the subject he may be.
I fancy there will be a large audience, for Waldron, though an absolute charlatan, has
a considerable popular following. Now, Mr. Malone, I have given you rather
more of my time than I had intended.
The individual must not monopolize what is meant for the world.
I shall be pleased to see you at the lecture to-night.
In the meantime, you will understand that no public use is to be made of any of the
material that I have given you." "But Mr. McArdle--my news editor, you know-
-will want to know what I have done."
"Tell him what you like. You can say, among other things, that if he
sends anyone else to intrude upon me I shall call upon him with a riding-whip.
But I leave it to you that nothing of all this appears in print.
Very good. Then the Zoological Institute's Hall at
eight-thirty to-night."
I had a last impression of red cheeks, blue rippling beard, and intolerant eyes, as he
waved me out of the room.
>
Chapter V "Question!"
What with the physical shocks incidental to my first interview with Professor
Challenger and the mental ones which accompanied the second, I was a somewhat
demoralized journalist by the time I found myself in Enmore Park once more.
In my aching head the one thought was throbbing that there really was truth in
this man's story, that it was of tremendous consequence, and that it would work up into
inconceivable copy for the Gazette when I could obtain permission to use it.
A taxicab was waiting at the end of the road, so I sprang into it and drove down to
the office.
McArdle was at his post as usual. "Well," he cried, expectantly, "what may it
run to? I'm thinking, young man, you have been in
the wars.
Don't tell me that he assaulted you." "We had a little difference at first."
"What a man it is! What did you do?"
"Well, he became more reasonable and we had a chat.
But I got nothing out of him--nothing for publication."
"I'm not so sure about that.
You got a black eye out of him, and that's for publication.
We can't have this reign of terror, Mr. Malone.
We must bring the man to his bearings.
I'll have a leaderette on him to-morrow that will raise a blister.
Just give me the material and I will engage to brand the fellow for ever.
Professor Munchausen--how's that for an inset headline?
Sir John Mandeville redivivus--Cagliostro-- all the imposters and bullies in history.
I'll show him up for the fraud he is."
"I wouldn't do that, sir." "Why not?"
"Because he is not a fraud at all." "What!" roared McArdle.
"You don't mean to say you really believe this stuff of his about mammoths and
mastodons and great sea sairpents?" "Well, I don't know about that.
I don't think he makes any claims of that kind.
But I do believe he has got something new." "Then for Heaven's sake, man, write it up!"
"I'm longing to, but all I know he gave me in confidence and on condition that I
didn't." I condensed into a few sentences the
Professor's narrative.
"That's how it stands." McArdle looked deeply incredulous.
"Well, Mr. Malone," he said at last, "about this scientific meeting to-night; there can
be no privacy about that, anyhow.
I don't suppose any paper will want to report it, for Waldron has been reported
already a dozen times, and no one is aware that Challenger will speak.
We may get a scoop, if we are lucky.
You'll be there in any case, so you'll just give us a pretty full report.
I'll keep space up to midnight."
My day was a busy one, and I had an early dinner at the Savage Club with Tarp Henry,
to whom I gave some account of my adventures.
He listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roared with laughter on
hearing that the Professor had convinced me.
"My dear chap, things don't happen like that in real life.
People don't stumble upon enormous discoveries and then lose their evidence.
Leave that to the novelists.
The fellow is as full of tricks as the monkey-house at the Zoo.
It's all bosh." "But the American poet?"
"He never existed."
"I saw his sketch-book." "Challenger's sketch-book."
"You think he drew that animal?" "Of course he did.
Who else?"
"Well, then, the photographs?" "There was nothing in the photographs.
By your own admission you only saw a bird." "A pterodactyl."
"That's what HE says.
He put the pterodactyl into your head." "Well, then, the bones?"
"First one out of an Irish stew. Second one vamped up for the occasion.
If you are clever and know your business you can fake a bone as easily as you can a
photograph." I began to feel uneasy.
Perhaps, after all, I had been premature in my acquiescence.
Then I had a sudden happy thought. "Will you come to the meeting?"
I asked.
Tarp Henry looked thoughtful. "He is not a popular person, the genial
Challenger," said he. "A lot of people have accounts to settle
with him.
I should say he is about the best-hated man in London.
If the medical students turn out there will be no end of a rag.
I don't want to get into a bear-garden."
"You might at least do him the justice to hear him state his own case."
"Well, perhaps it's only fair. All right.
I'm your man for the evening."
When we arrived at the hall we found a much greater concourse than I had expected.
A line of electric broughams discharged their little cargoes of white-bearded
professors, while the dark stream of humbler pedestrians, who crowded through
the arched door-way, showed that the
audience would be popular as well as scientific.
Indeed, it became evident to us as soon as we had taken our seats that a youthful and
even boyish spirit was abroad in the gallery and the back portions of the hall.
Looking behind me, I could see rows of faces of the familiar medical student type.
Apparently the great hospitals had each sent down their contingent.
The behavior of the audience at present was good-humored, but mischievous.
Scraps of popular songs were chorused with an enthusiasm which was a strange prelude
to a scientific lecture, and there was already a tendency to personal chaff which
promised a jovial evening to others,
however embarrassing it might be to the recipients of these dubious honors.
Thus, when old Doctor Meldrum, with his well-known curly-brimmed opera-hat,
appeared upon the platform, there was such a universal query of "Where DID you get
that tile?" that he hurriedly removed it, and concealed it furtively under his chair.
When gouty Professor Wadley limped down to his seat there were general affectionate
inquiries from all parts of the hall as to the exact state of his poor toe, which
caused him obvious embarrassment.
The greatest demonstration of all, however, was at the entrance of my new acquaintance,
Professor Challenger, when he passed down to take his place at the extreme end of the
front row of the platform.
Such a yell of welcome broke forth when his black beard first protruded round the
corner that I began to suspect Tarp Henry was right in his surmise, and that this
assemblage was there not merely for the
sake of the lecture, but because it had got rumored abroad that the famous Professor
would take part in the proceedings.
There was some sympathetic laughter on his entrance among the front benches of well-
dressed spectators, as though the demonstration of the students in this
instance was not unwelcome to them.
That greeting was, indeed, a frightful outburst of sound, the uproar of the
carnivora cage when the step of the bucket- bearing keeper is heard in the distance.
There was an offensive tone in it, perhaps, and yet in the main it struck me as mere
riotous outcry, the noisy reception of one who amused and interested them, rather than
of one they disliked or despised.
Challenger smiled with weary and tolerant contempt, as a kindly man would meet the
yapping of a litter of puppies.
He sat slowly down, blew out his chest, passed his hand caressingly down his beard,
and looked with drooping eyelids and supercilious eyes at the crowded hall
before him.
The uproar of his advent had not yet died away when Professor Ronald Murray, the
chairman, and Mr. Waldron, the lecturer, threaded their way to the front, and the
proceedings began.
Professor Murray will, I am sure, excuse me if I say that he has the common fault of
most Englishmen of being inaudible.
Why on earth people who have something to say which is worth hearing should not take
the slight trouble to learn how to make it heard is one of the strange mysteries of
modern life.
Their methods are as reasonable as to try to pour some precious stuff from the spring
to the reservoir through a non-conducting pipe, which could by the least effort be
opened.
Professor Murray made several profound remarks to his white tie and to the water-
carafe upon the table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to the silver candlestick
upon his right.
Then he sat down, and Mr. Waldron, the famous popular lecturer, rose amid a
general murmur of applause.
He was a stern, gaunt man, with a harsh voice, and an aggressive manner, but he had
the merit of knowing how to assimilate the ideas of other men, and to pass them on in
a way which was intelligible and even
interesting to the lay public, with a happy knack of being funny about the most
unlikely objects, so that the precession of the Equinox or the formation of a
vertebrate became a highly humorous process as treated by him.
It was a bird's-eye view of creation, as interpreted by science, which, in language
always clear and sometimes picturesque, he unfolded before us.
He told us of the globe, a huge mass of flaming gas, flaring through the heavens.
Then he pictured the solidification, the cooling, the wrinkling which formed the
mountains, the steam which turned to water, the slow preparation of the stage upon
which was to be played the inexplicable drama of life.
On the origin of life itself he was discreetly vague.
That the germs of it could hardly have survived the original roasting was, he
declared, fairly certain. Therefore it had come later.
Had it built itself out of the cooling, inorganic elements of the globe?
Very likely. Had the germs of it arrived from outside
upon a meteor?
It was hardly conceivable. On the whole, the wisest man was the least
dogmatic upon the point.
We could not--or at least we had not succeeded up to date in making organic life
in our laboratories out of inorganic materials.
The gulf between the dead and the living was something which our chemistry could not
as yet bridge.
But there was a higher and subtler chemistry of Nature, which, working with
great forces over long epochs, might well produce results which were impossible for
us.
There the matter must be left.
This brought the lecturer to the great ladder of animal life, beginning low down
in molluscs and feeble sea creatures, then up rung by rung through reptiles and
fishes, till at last we came to a kangaroo-
rat, a creature which brought forth its young alive, the direct ancestor of all
mammals, and presumably, therefore, of everyone in the audience.
("No, no," from a sceptical student in the back row.)
If the young gentleman in the red tie who cried "No, no," and who presumably claimed
to have been hatched out of an egg, would wait upon him after the lecture, he would
be glad to see such a curiosity.
(Laughter.) It was strange to think that the climax of
all the age-long process of Nature had been the creation of that gentleman in the red
But had the process stopped? Was this gentleman to be taken as the final
type--the be-all and end-all of development?
He hoped that he would not hurt the feelings of the gentleman in the red tie if
he maintained that, whatever virtues that gentleman might possess in private life,
still the vast processes of the universe
were not fully justified if they were to end entirely in his production.
Evolution was not a spent force, but one still working, and even greater
achievements were in store.
Having thus, amid a general titter, played very prettily with his interrupter, the
lecturer went back to his picture of the past, the drying of the seas, the emergence
of the sand-bank, the sluggish, viscous
life which lay upon their margins, the overcrowded lagoons, the tendency of the
sea creatures to take refuge upon the mud- flats, the abundance of food awaiting them,
their consequent enormous growth.
"Hence, ladies and gentlemen," he added, "that frightful brood of saurians which
still affright our eyes when seen in the Wealden or in the Solenhofen slates, but
which were fortunately extinct long before
the first appearance of mankind upon this planet."
"Question!" boomed a voice from the platform.
Mr. Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acid humor, as exemplified
upon the gentleman with the red tie, which made it perilous to interrupt him.
But this interjection appeared to him so absurd that he was at a loss how to deal
with it.
So looks the Shakespearean who is confronted by a rancid Baconian, or the
astronomer who is assailed by a flat-earth fanatic.
He paused for a moment, and then, raising his voice, repeated slowly the words:
"Which were extinct before the coming of man."
"Question!" boomed the voice once more.
Waldron looked with amazement along the line of professors upon the platform until
his eyes fell upon the figure of Challenger, who leaned back in his chair
with closed eyes and an amused expression, as if he were smiling in his sleep.
"I see!" said Waldron, with a shrug.
"It is my friend Professor Challenger," and amid laughter he renewed his lecture as if
this was a final explanation and no more need be said.
But the incident was far from being closed.
Whatever path the lecturer took amid the wilds of the past seemed invariably to lead
him to some assertion as to extinct or prehistoric life which instantly brought
the same bulls' bellow from the Professor.
The audience began to anticipate it and to roar with delight when it came.
The packed benches of students joined in, and every time Challenger's beard opened,
before any sound could come forth, there was a yell of "Question!" from a hundred
voices, and an answering counter cry of "Order!" and "Shame!" from as many more.
Waldron, though a hardened lecturer and a strong man, became rattled.
He hesitated, stammered, repeated himself, got snarled in a long sentence, and finally
turned furiously upon the cause of his troubles.
"This is really intolerable!" he cried, glaring across the platform.
"I must ask you, Professor Challenger, to cease these ignorant and unmannerly
interruptions."
There was a hush over the hall, the students rigid with delight at seeing the
high gods on Olympus quarrelling among themselves.
Challenger levered his bulky figure slowly out of his chair.
"I must in turn ask you, Mr. Waldron," he said, "to cease to make assertions which
are not in strict accordance with scientific fact."
The words unloosed a tempest.
"Shame! Shame!"
"Give him a hearing!" "Put him out!"
"Shove him off the platform!"
"Fair play!" emerged from a general roar of amusement or execration.
The chairman was on his feet flapping both his hands and bleating excitedly.
"Professor Challenger--personal--views-- later," were the solid peaks above his
clouds of inaudible mutter. The interrupter bowed, smiled, stroked his
beard, and relapsed into his chair.
Waldron, very flushed and warlike, continued his observations.
Now and then, as he made an assertion, he shot a venomous glance at his opponent, who
seemed to be slumbering deeply, with the same broad, happy smile upon his face.
At last the lecture came to an end--I am inclined to think that it was a premature
one, as the peroration was hurried and disconnected.
The thread of the argument had been rudely broken, and the audience was restless and
expectant.
Waldron sat down, and, after a chirrup from the chairman, Professor Challenger rose and
advanced to the edge of the platform. In the interests of my paper I took down
his speech verbatim.
"Ladies and Gentlemen," he began, amid a sustained interruption from the back.
"I beg pardon--Ladies, Gentlemen, and Children--I must apologize, I had
inadvertently omitted a considerable section of this audience" (tumult, during
which the Professor stood with one hand
raised and his enormous head nodding sympathetically, as if he were bestowing a
pontifical blessing upon the crowd), "I have been selected to move a vote of thanks
to Mr. Waldron for the very picturesque and
imaginative address to which we have just listened.
There are points in it with which I disagree, and it has been my duty to
indicate them as they arose, but, none the less, Mr. Waldron has accomplished his
object well, that object being to give a
simple and interesting account of what he conceives to have been the history of our
planet.
Popular lectures are the easiest to listen to, but Mr. Waldron" (here he beamed and
blinked at the lecturer) "will excuse me when I say that they are necessarily both
superficial and misleading, since they have
to be graded to the comprehension of an ignorant audience."
(Ironical cheering.) "Popular lecturers are in their nature
parasitic."
(Angry gesture of protest from Mr. Waldron.)
"They exploit for fame or cash the work which has been done by their indigent and
unknown brethren.
One smallest new fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into the temple
of science, far outweighs any second-hand exposition which passes an idle hour, but
can leave no useful result behind it.
I put forward this obvious reflection, not out of any desire to disparage Mr. Waldron
in particular, but that you may not lose your sense of proportion and mistake the
acolyte for the high priest."
(At this point Mr. Waldron whispered to the chairman, who half rose and said something
severely to his water-carafe.) "But enough of this!"
(Loud and prolonged cheers.)
"Let me pass to some subject of wider interest.
What is the particular point upon which I, as an original investigator, have
challenged our lecturer's accuracy?
It is upon the permanence of certain types of animal life upon the earth.
I do not speak upon this subject as an amateur, nor, I may add, as a popular
lecturer, but I speak as one whose scientific conscience compels him to adhere
closely to facts, when I say that Mr.
Waldron is very wrong in supposing that because he has never himself seen a so-
called prehistoric animal, therefore these creatures no longer exist.
They are indeed, as he has said, our ancestors, but they are, if I may use the
expression, our contemporary ancestors, who can still be found with all their hideous
and formidable characteristics if one has
but the energy and hardihood to seek their haunts.
Creatures which were supposed to be Jurassic, monsters who would hunt down and
devour our largest and fiercest mammals, still exist."
(Cries of "Bosh!"
"Prove it!" "How do YOU know?"
"Question!") "How do I know, you ask me?
I know because I have visited their secret haunts.
I know because I have seen some of them." (Applause, uproar, and a voice, "Liar!")
"Am I a liar?"
(General hearty and noisy assent.) "Did I hear someone say that I was a liar?
Will the person who called me a liar kindly stand up that I may know him?"
(A voice, "Here he is, sir!" and an inoffensive little person in spectacles,
struggling violently, was held up among a group of students.)
"Did you venture to call me a liar?"
("No, sir, no!" shouted the accused, and disappeared like a jack-in-the-box.)
"If any person in this hall dares to doubt my veracity, I shall be glad to have a few
words with him after the lecture."
("Liar!") "Who said that?"
(Again the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into the
air.)
"If I come down among you----" (General chorus of "Come, love, come!" which
interrupted the proceedings for some moments, while the chairman, standing up
and waving both his arms, seemed to be conducting the music.
The Professor, with his face flushed, his nostrils dilated, and his beard bristling,
was now in a proper Berserk mood.)
"Every great discoverer has been met with the same incredulity--the sure brand of a
generation of fools.
When great facts are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination
which would help you to understand them.
You can only throw mud at the men who have risked their lives to open new fields to
science. You persecute the prophets!
Galileo!
Darwin, and I----" (Prolonged cheering and complete interruption.)
All this is from my hurried notes taken at the time, which give little notion of the
absolute chaos to which the assembly had by this time been reduced.
So terrific was the uproar that several ladies had already beaten a hurried
retreat.
Grave and reverend seniors seemed to have caught the prevailing spirit as badly as
the students, and I saw white-bearded men rising and shaking their fists at the
obdurate Professor.
The whole great audience seethed and simmered like a boiling pot.
The Professor took a step forward and raised both his hands.
There was something so big and arresting and virile in the man that the clatter and
shouting died gradually away before his commanding gesture and his masterful eyes.
He seemed to have a definite message.
They hushed to hear it. "I will not detain you," he said.
"It is not worth it.
Truth is truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men--and, I fear I must
add, of their equally foolish seniors-- cannot affect the matter.
I claim that I have opened a new field of science.
You dispute it." (Cheers.)
"Then I put you to the test.
Will you accredit one or more of your own number to go out as your representatives
and test my statement in your name?"
Mr. Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, rose among the
audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with the withered aspect of a theologian.
He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether the results to which he
had alluded in his remarks had been obtained during a journey to the headwaters
of the Amazon made by him two years before.
Professor Challenger answered that they had.
Mr. Summerlee desired to know how it was that Professor Challenger claimed to have
made discoveries in those regions which had been overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and
other previous explorers of established scientific repute.
Professor Challenger answered that Mr. Summerlee appeared to be confusing the
Amazon with the Thames; that it was in reality a somewhat larger river; that Mr.
Summerlee might be interested to know that
with the Orinoco, which communicated with it, some fifty thousand miles of country
were opened up, and that in so vast a space it was not impossible for one person to
find what another had missed.
Mr. Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fully appreciated the difference
between the Thames and the Amazon, which lay in the fact that any assertion about
the former could be tested, while about the latter it could not.
He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitude
of the country in which prehistoric animals were to be found.
Professor Challenger replied that he reserved such information for good reasons
of his own, but would be prepared to give it with proper precautions to a committee
chosen from the audience.
Would Mr. Summerlee serve on such a committee and test his story in person?
Mr. Summerlee: "Yes, I will." (Great cheering.)
Professor Challenger: "Then I guarantee that I will place in your hands such
material as will enable you to find your way.
It is only right, however, since Mr. Summerlee goes to check my statement that I
should have one or more with him who may check his.
I will not disguise from you that there are difficulties and dangers.
Mr. Summerlee will need a younger colleague.
May I ask for volunteers?"
It is thus that the great crisis of a man's life springs out at him.
Could I have imagined when I entered that hall that I was about to pledge myself to a
wilder adventure than had ever come to me in my dreams?
But Gladys--was it not the very opportunity of which she spoke?
Gladys would have told me to go. I had sprung to my feet.
I was speaking, and yet I had prepared no words.
Tarp Henry, my companion, was plucking at my skirts and I heard him whispering, "Sit
down, Malone!
Don't make a public *** of yourself." At the same time I was aware that a tall,
thin man, with dark gingery hair, a few seats in front of me, was also upon his
feet.
He glared back at me with hard angry eyes, but I refused to give way.
"I will go, Mr. Chairman," I kept repeating over and over again.
"Name!
Name!" cried the audience. "My name is Edward Dunn Malone.
I am the reporter of the Daily Gazette. I claim to be an absolutely unprejudiced
witness."
"What is YOUR name, sir?" the chairman asked of my tall rival.
"I am Lord John Roxton.
I have already been up the Amazon, I know all the ground, and have special
qualifications for this investigation."
"Lord John Roxton's reputation as a sportsman and a traveler is, of course,
world-famous," said the chairman; "at the same time it would certainly be as well to
have a member of the Press upon such an expedition."
"Then I move," said Professor Challenger, "that both these gentlemen be elected, as
representatives of this meeting, to accompany Professor Summerlee upon his
journey to investigate and to report upon the truth of my statements."
And so, amid shouting and cheering, our fate was decided, and I found myself borne
away in the human current which swirled towards the door, with my mind half stunned
by the vast new project which had risen so suddenly before it.
As I emerged from the hall I was conscious for a moment of a rush of laughing
students--down the pavement, and of an arm wielding a heavy umbrella, which rose and
fell in the midst of them.
Then, amid a mixture of groans and cheers, Professor Challenger's electric brougham
slid from the curb, and I found myself walking under the silvery lights of Regent
Street, full of thoughts of Gladys and of wonder as to my future.
Suddenly there was a touch at my elbow.
I turned, and found myself looking into the humorous, masterful eyes of the tall, thin
man who had volunteered to be my companion on this strange quest.
"Mr. Malone, I understand," said he.
"We are to be companions--what? My rooms are just over the road, in the
Albany.
Perhaps you would have the kindness to spare me half an hour, for there are one or
two things that I badly want to say to you."
>
Chapter VI "I was the Flail of the Lord"
Lord John Roxton and I turned down Vigo Street together and through the dingy
portals of the famous aristocratic rookery.
At the end of a long drab passage my new acquaintance pushed open a door and turned
on an electric switch.
A number of lamps shining through tinted shades bathed the whole great room before
us in a ruddy radiance.
Standing in the doorway and glancing round me, I had a general impression of
extraordinary comfort and elegance combined with an atmosphere of masculine virility.
Everywhere there were mingled the luxury of the wealthy man of taste and the careless
untidiness of the bachelor.
Rich furs and strange iridescent mats from some Oriental bazaar were scattered upon
the floor.
Pictures and prints which even my unpractised eyes could recognize as being
of great price and rarity hung thick upon the walls.
Sketches of boxers, of ballet-girls, and of racehorses alternated with a sensuous
Fragonard, a martial Girardet, and a dreamy Turner.
But amid these varied ornaments there were scattered the trophies which brought back
strongly to my recollection the fact that Lord John Roxton was one of the great all-
round sportsmen and athletes of his day.
A dark-blue oar crossed with a cherry-pink one above his mantel-piece spoke of the old
Oxonian and Leander man, while the foils and boxing-gloves above and below them were
the tools of a man who had won supremacy with each.
Like a dado round the room was the jutting line of splendid heavy game-heads, the best
of their sort from every quarter of the world, with the rare white rhinoceros of
the Lado Enclave drooping its supercilious lip above them all.
In the center of the rich red carpet was a black and gold Louis Quinze table, a lovely
antique, now sacrilegiously desecrated with marks of glasses and the scars of cigar-
stumps.
On it stood a silver tray of smokables and a burnished spirit-stand, from which and an
adjacent siphon my silent host proceeded to charge two high glasses.
Having indicated an arm-chair to me and placed my refreshment near it, he handed me
a long, smooth Havana.
Then, seating himself opposite to me, he looked at me long and fixedly with his
strange, twinkling, reckless eyes--eyes of a cold light blue, the color of a glacier
lake.
Through the thin haze of my cigar-smoke I noted the details of a face which was
already familiar to me from many photographs--the strongly-curved nose, the
hollow, worn cheeks, the dark, ruddy hair,
thin at the top, the crisp, virile moustaches, the small, aggressive tuft upon
his projecting chin.
Something there was of Napoleon III., something of Don Quixote, and yet again
something which was the essence of the English country gentleman, the keen, alert,
open-air lover of dogs and of horses.
His skin was of a rich flower-pot red from sun and wind.
His eyebrows were tufted and overhanging, which gave those naturally cold eyes an
almost ferocious aspect, an impression which was increased by his strong and
furrowed brow.
In figure he was spare, but very strongly built--indeed, he had often proved that
there were few men in England capable of such sustained exertions.
His height was a little over six feet, but he seemed shorter on account of a peculiar
rounding of the shoulders.
Such was the famous Lord John Roxton as he sat opposite to me, biting hard upon his
cigar and watching me steadily in a long and embarrassing silence.
"Well," said he, at last, "we've gone and done it, young fellah my lad."
(This curious phrase he pronounced as if it were all one word--"young-fellah-me-lad.")
"Yes, we've taken a jump, you an' me.
I suppose, now, when you went into that room there was no such notion in your head-
-what?" "No thought of it."
"The same here.
No thought of it. And here we are, up to our necks in the
tureen.
Why, I've only been back three weeks from Uganda, and taken a place in Scotland, and
signed the lease and all. Pretty goin's on--what?
How does it hit you?"
"Well, it is all in the main line of my business.
I am a journalist on the Gazette." "Of course--you said so when you took it
on.
By the way, I've got a small job for you, if you'll help me."
"With pleasure." "Don't mind takin' a risk, do you?"
"What is the risk?"
"Well, it's Ballinger--he's the risk. You've heard of him?"
"No." "Why, young fellah, where HAVE you lived?
Sir John Ballinger is the best gentleman jock in the north country.
I could hold him on the flat at my best, but over jumps he's my master.
Well, it's an open secret that when he's out of trainin' he drinks hard--strikin' an
average, he calls it. He got delirium on Toosday, and has been
ragin' like a devil ever since.
His room is above this.
The doctors say that it is all up with the old dear unless some food is got into him,
but as he lies in bed with a revolver on his coverlet, and swears he will put six of
the best through anyone that comes near
him, there's been a bit of a strike among the serving-men.
He's a hard nail, is Jack, and a dead shot, too, but you can't leave a Grand National
winner to die like that--what?"
"What do you mean to do, then?" I asked.
"Well, my idea was that you and I could rush him.
He may be dozin', and at the worst he can only wing one of us, and the other should
have him.
If we can get his bolster-cover round his arms and then 'phone up a stomach-pump,
we'll give the old dear the supper of his life."
It was a rather desperate business to come suddenly into one's day's work.
I don't think that I am a particularly brave man.
I have an Irish imagination which makes the unknown and the untried more terrible than
they are.
On the other hand, I was brought up with a horror of cowardice and with a terror of
such a stigma.
I dare say that I could throw myself over a precipice, like the Hun in the history
books, if my courage to do it were questioned, and yet it would surely be
pride and fear, rather than courage, which would be my inspiration.
Therefore, although every nerve in my body shrank from the whisky-maddened figure
which I pictured in the room above, I still answered, in as careless a voice as I could
command, that I was ready to go.
Some further remark of Lord Roxton's about the danger only made me irritable.
"Talking won't make it any better," said I. "Come on."
I rose from my chair and he from his.
Then with a little confidential chuckle of laughter, he patted me two or three times
on the chest, finally pushing me back into my chair.
"All right, sonny my lad--you'll do," said he.
I looked up in surprise. "I saw after Jack Ballinger myself this
mornin'.
He blew a hole in the skirt of my kimono, bless his shaky old hand, but we got a
jacket on him, and he's to be all right in a week.
I say, young fellah, I hope you don't mind- -what?
You see, between you an' me close-tiled, I look on this South American business as a
mighty serious thing, and if I have a pal with me I want a man I can bank on.
So I sized you down, and I'm bound to say that you came well out of it.
You see, it's all up to you and me, for this old Summerlee man will want dry-
nursin' from the first.
By the way, are you by any chance the Malone who is expected to get his Rugby cap
for Ireland?" "A reserve, perhaps."
"I thought I remembered your face.
Why, I was there when you got that try against Richmond--as fine a swervin' run as
I saw the whole season.
I never miss a Rugby match if I can help it, for it is the manliest game we have
left. Well, I didn't ask you in here just to talk
sport.
We've got to fix our business. Here are the sailin's, on the first page of
the Times.
There's a Booth boat for Para next Wednesday week, and if the Professor and
you can work it, I think we should take it- -what?
Very good, I'll fix it with him.
What about your outfit?" "My paper will see to that."
"Can you shoot?" "About average Territorial standard."
"Good Lord! as bad as that?
It's the last thing you young fellahs think of learnin'.
You're all bees without stings, so far as lookin' after the hive goes.
You'll look silly, some o' these days, when someone comes along an' sneaks the honey.
But you'll need to hold your gun straight in South America, for, unless our friend
the Professor is a madman or a liar, we may see some *** things before we get back.
What gun have you?"
He crossed to an oaken cupboard, and as he threw it open I caught a glimpse of
glistening rows of parallel barrels, like the pipes of an organ.
"I'll see what I can spare you out of my own battery," said he.
One by one he took out a succession of beautiful rifles, opening and shutting them
with a snap and a clang, and then patting them as he put them back into the rack as
tenderly as a mother would *** her children.
"This is a Bland's .577 axite express," said he.
"I got that big fellow with it."
He glanced up at the white rhinoceros. "Ten more yards, and he'd would have added
me to HIS collection. 'On that conical bullet his one chance
hangs, 'Tis the weak one's advantage fair.'
Hope you know your Gordon, for he's the poet of the horse and the gun and the man
that handles both.
Now, here's a useful tool--.470, telescopic sight, double ejector, point-blank up to
three-fifty. That's the rifle I used against the
Peruvian slave-drivers three years ago.
I was the flail of the Lord up in those parts, I may tell you, though you won't
find it in any Blue-book.
There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right
and justice, or you never feel clean again. That's why I made a little war on my own.
Declared it myself, waged it myself, ended it myself.
Each of those nicks is for a slave murderer--a good row of them--what?
That big one is for Pedro Lopez, the king of them all, that I killed in a backwater
of the Putomayo River. Now, here's something that would do for
you."
He took out a beautiful brown-and-silver rifle.
"Well rubbered at the stock, sharply sighted, five cartridges to the clip.
You can trust your life to that."
He handed it to me and closed the door of his oak cabinet.
"By the way," he continued, coming back to his chair, "what do you know of this
Professor Challenger?"
"I never saw him till to-day." "Well, neither did I.
It's funny we should both sail under sealed orders from a man we don't know.
He seemed an uppish old bird.
His brothers of science don't seem too fond of him, either.
How came you to take an interest in the affair?"
I told him shortly my experiences of the morning, and he listened intently.
Then he drew out a map of South America and laid it on the table.
"I believe every single word he said to you was the truth," said he, earnestly, "and,
mind you, I have something to go on when I speak like that.
South America is a place I love, and I think, if you take it right through from
Darien to Fuego, it's the grandest, richest, most wonderful bit of earth upon
this planet.
People don't know it yet, and don't realize what it may become.
I've been up an' down it from end to end, and had two dry seasons in those very
parts, as I told you when I spoke of the war I made on the slave-dealers.
Well, when I was up there I heard some yarns of the same kind--traditions of
Indians and the like, but with somethin' behind them, no doubt.
The more you knew of that country, young fellah, the more you would understand that
anythin' was possible--ANYTHIN'!
There are just some narrow water-lanes along which folk travel, and outside that
it is all darkness.
Now, down here in the Matto Grande"--he swept his cigar over a part of the map--"or
up in this corner where three countries meet, nothin' would surprise me.
As that chap said to-night, there are fifty-thousand miles of water-way runnin'
through a forest that is very near the size of Europe.
You and I could be as far away from each other as Scotland is from Constantinople,
and yet each of us be in the same great Brazilian forest.
Man has just made a track here and a scrape there in the maze.
Why, the river rises and falls the best part of forty feet, and half the country is
a morass that you can't pass over.
Why shouldn't somethin' new and wonderful lie in such a country?
And why shouldn't we be the men to find it out?
Besides," he added, his ***, gaunt face shining with delight, "there's a sportin'
risk in every mile of it. I'm like an old golf-ball--I've had all the
white paint knocked off me long ago.
Life can whack me about now, and it can't leave a mark.
But a sportin' risk, young fellah, that's the salt of existence.
Then it's worth livin' again.
We're all gettin' a deal too soft and dull and comfy.
Give me the great waste lands and the wide spaces, with a gun in my fist and somethin'
to look for that's worth findin'.
I've tried war and steeplechasin' and aeroplanes, but this huntin' of beasts that
look like a lobster-supper dream is a brand-new sensation."
He chuckled with glee at the prospect.
Perhaps I have dwelt too long upon this new acquaintance, but he is to be my comrade
for many a day, and so I have tried to set him down as I first saw him, with his
quaint personality and his *** little tricks of speech and of thought.
It was only the need of getting in the account of my meeting which drew me at last
from his company.
I left him seated amid his pink radiance, oiling the lock of his favorite rifle,
while he still chuckled to himself at the thought of the adventures which awaited us.
It was very clear to me that if dangers lay before us I could not in all England have
found a cooler head or a braver spirit with which to share them.
That night, wearied as I was after the wonderful happenings of the day, I sat late
with McArdle, the news editor, explaining to him the whole situation, which he
thought important enough to bring next
morning before the notice of Sir George Beaumont, the chief.
It was agreed that I should write home full accounts of my adventures in the shape of
successive letters to McArdle, and that these should either be edited for the
Gazette as they arrived, or held back to be
published later, according to the wishes of Professor Challenger, since we could not
yet know what conditions he might attach to those directions which should guide us to
the unknown land.
In response to a telephone inquiry, we received nothing more definite than a
fulmination against the Press, ending up with the remark that if we would notify our
boat he would hand us any directions which
he might think it proper to give us at the moment of starting.
A second question from us failed to elicit any answer at all, save a plaintive bleat
from his wife to the effect that her husband was in a very violent temper
already, and that she hoped we would do nothing to make it worse.
A third attempt, later in the day, provoked a terrific crash, and a subsequent message
from the Central Exchange that Professor Challenger's receiver had been shattered.
After that we abandoned all attempt at communication.
And now my patient readers, I can address you directly no longer.
From now onwards (if, indeed, any continuation of this narrative should ever
reach you) it can only be through the paper which I represent.
In the hands of the editor I leave this account of the events which have led up to
one of the most remarkable expeditions of all time, so that if I never return to
England there shall be some record as to how the affair came about.
I am writing these last lines in the saloon of the Booth liner Francisca, and they will
go back by the pilot to the keeping of Mr. McArdle.
Let me draw one last picture before I close the notebook--a picture which is the last
memory of the old country which I bear away with me.
It is a wet, foggy morning in the late spring; a thin, cold rain is falling.
Three shining mackintoshed figures are walking down the quay, making for the gang-
plank of the great liner from which the blue-peter is flying.
In front of them a porter pushes a trolley piled high with trunks, wraps, and gun-
cases.
Professor Summerlee, a long, melancholy figure, walks with dragging steps and
drooping head, as one who is already profoundly sorry for himself.
Lord John Roxton steps briskly, and his thin, eager face beams forth between his
hunting-cap and his muffler.
As for myself, I am glad to have got the bustling days of preparation and the pangs
of leave-taking behind me, and I have no doubt that I show it in my bearing.
Suddenly, just as we reach the vessel, there is a shout behind us.
It is Professor Challenger, who had promised to see us off.
He runs after us, a puffing, red-faced, irascible figure.
"No thank you," says he; "I should much prefer not to go aboard.
I have only a few words to say to you, and they can very well be said where we are.
I beg you not to imagine that I am in any way indebted to you for making this
journey.
I would have you to understand that it is a matter of perfect indifference to me, and I
refuse to entertain the most remote sense of personal obligation.
Truth is truth, and nothing which you can report can affect it in any way, though it
may excite the emotions and allay the curiosity of a number of very ineffectual
people.
My directions for your instruction and guidance are in this sealed envelope.
You will open it when you reach a town upon the Amazon which is called Manaos, but not
until the date and hour which is marked upon the outside.
Have I made myself clear?
I leave the strict observance of my conditions entirely to your honor.
No, Mr. Malone, I will place no restriction upon your correspondence, since the
ventilation of the facts is the object of your journey; but I demand that you shall
give no particulars as to your exact
destination, and that nothing be actually published until your return.
Good-bye, sir.
You have done something to mitigate my feelings for the loathsome profession to
which you unhappily belong. Good-bye, Lord John.
Science is, as I understand, a sealed book to you; but you may congratulate yourself
upon the hunting-field which awaits you.
You will, no doubt, have the opportunity of describing in the Field how you brought
down the rocketing dimorphodon. And good-bye to you also, Professor
Summerlee.
If you are still capable of self- improvement, of which I am frankly
unconvinced, you will surely return to London a wiser man."
So he turned upon his heel, and a minute later from the deck I could see his short,
squat figure bobbing about in the distance as he made his way back to his train.
Well, we are well down Channel now.
There's the last bell for letters, and it's good-bye to the pilot.
We'll be "down, hull-down, on the old trail" from now on.
God bless all we leave behind us, and send us safely back.
>
Chapter VII "To-morrow we Disappear into the Unknown"
I will not bore those whom this narrative may reach by an account of our luxurious
voyage upon the Booth liner, nor will I tell of our week's stay at Para (save that
I should wish to acknowledge the great
kindness of the Pereira da Pinta Company in helping us to get together our equipment).
I will also allude very briefly to our river journey, up a wide, slow-moving,
clay-tinted stream, in a steamer which was little smaller than that which had carried
us across the Atlantic.
Eventually we found ourselves through the narrows of Obidos and reached the town of
Manaos.
Here we were rescued from the limited attractions of the local inn by Mr.
Shortman, the representative of the British and Brazilian Trading Company.
In his hospital Fazenda we spent our time until the day when we were empowered to
open the letter of instructions given to us by Professor Challenger.
Before I reach the surprising events of that date I would desire to give a clearer
sketch of my comrades in this enterprise, and of the associates whom we had already
gathered together in South America.
I speak freely, and I leave the use of my material to your own discretion, Mr.
McArdle, since it is through your hands that this report must pass before it
reaches the world.
The scientific attainments of Professor Summerlee are too well known for me to
trouble to recapitulate them.
He is better equipped for a rough expedition of this sort than one would
imagine at first sight.
His tall, gaunt, stringy figure is insensible to fatigue, and his dry, half-
sarcastic, and often wholly unsympathetic manner is uninfluenced by any change in his
surroundings.
Though in his sixty-sixth year, I have never heard him express any dissatisfaction
at the occasional hardships which we have had to encounter.
I had regarded his presence as an encumbrance to the expedition, but, as a
matter of fact, I am now well convinced that his power of endurance is as great as
my own.
In temper he is naturally acid and sceptical.
From the beginning he has never concealed his belief that Professor Challenger is an
absolute fraud, that we are all embarked upon an absurd wild-goose chase and that we
are likely to reap nothing but
disappointment and danger in South America, and corresponding ridicule in England.
Such are the views which, with much passionate distortion of his thin features
and wagging of his thin, goat-like beard, he poured into our ears all the way from
Southampton to Manaos.
Since landing from the boat he has obtained some consolation from the beauty and
variety of the insect and bird life around him, for he is absolutely whole-hearted in
his devotion to science.
He spends his days flitting through the woods with his shot-gun and his butterfly-
net, and his evenings in mounting the many specimens he has acquired.
Among his minor peculiarities are that he is careless as to his attire, unclean in
his person, exceedingly absent-minded in his habits, and addicted to smoking a short
briar pipe, which is seldom out of his mouth.
He has been upon several scientific expeditions in his youth (he was with
Robertson in Papua), and the life of the camp and the canoe is nothing fresh to him.
Lord John Roxton has some points in common with Professor Summerlee, and others in
which they are the very antithesis to each other.
He is twenty years younger, but has something of the same spare, scraggy
physique.
As to his appearance, I have, as I recollect, described it in that portion of
my narrative which I have left behind me in London.
He is exceedingly neat and prim in his ways, dresses always with great care in
white drill suits and high brown mosquito- boots, and shaves at least once a day.
Like most men of action, he is laconic in speech, and sinks readily into his own
thoughts, but he is always quick to answer a question or join in a conversation,
talking in a ***, jerky, half-humorous fashion.
His knowledge of the world, and very especially of South America, is surprising,
and he has a whole-hearted belief in the possibilities of our journey which is not
to be dashed by the sneers of Professor Summerlee.
He has a gentle voice and a quiet manner, but behind his twinkling blue eyes there
lurks a capacity for furious wrath and implacable resolution, the more dangerous
because they are held in leash.
He spoke little of his own exploits in Brazil and Peru, but it was a revelation to
me to find the excitement which was caused by his presence among the riverine natives,
who looked upon him as their champion and protector.
The exploits of the Red Chief, as they called him, had become legends among them,
but the real facts, as far as I could learn them, were amazing enough.
These were that Lord John had found himself some years before in that no-man's-land
which is formed by the half-defined frontiers between Peru, Brazil, and
Columbia.
In this great district the wild rubber tree flourishes, and has become, as in the
Congo, a curse to the natives which can only be compared to their forced labor
under the Spaniards upon the old silver mines of Darien.
A handful of villainous half-breeds dominated the country, armed such Indians
as would support them, and turned the rest into slaves, terrorizing them with the most
inhuman tortures in order to force them to
gather the india-rubber, which was then floated down the river to Para.
Lord John Roxton expostulated on behalf of the wretched victims, and received nothing
but threats and insults for his pains.
He then formally declared war against Pedro Lopez, the leader of the slave-drivers,
enrolled a band of runaway slaves in his service, armed them, and conducted a
campaign, which ended by his killing with
his own hands the notorious half-breed and breaking down the system which he
represented.
No wonder that the ginger-headed man with the silky voice and the free and easy
manners was now looked upon with deep interest upon the banks of the great South
American river, though the feelings he
inspired were naturally mixed, since the gratitude of the natives was equaled by the
resentment of those who desired to exploit them.
One useful result of his former experiences was that he could talk fluently in the
Lingoa Geral, which is the peculiar talk, one-third Portuguese and two-thirds Indian,
which is current all over Brazil.
I have said before that Lord John Roxton was a South Americomaniac.
He could not speak of that great country without ardor, and this ardor was
infectious, for, ignorant as I was, he fixed my attention and stimulated my
curiosity.
How I wish I could reproduce the glamour of his discourses, the peculiar mixture of
accurate knowledge and of racy imagination which gave them their fascination, until
even the Professor's cynical and sceptical
smile would gradually vanish from his thin face as he listened.
He would tell the history of the mighty river so rapidly explored (for some of the
first conquerors of Peru actually crossed the entire continent upon its waters), and
yet so unknown in regard to all that lay behind its ever-changing banks.
"What is there?" he would cry, pointing to the north.
"Wood and marsh and unpenetrated jungle.
Who knows what it may shelter? And there to the south?
A wilderness of swampy forest, where no white man has ever been.
The unknown is up against us on every side.
Outside the narrow lines of the rivers what does anyone know?
Who will say what is possible in such a country?
Why should old man Challenger not be right?"
At which direct defiance the stubborn sneer would reappear upon Professor Summerlee's
face, and he would sit, shaking his sardonic head in unsympathetic silence,
behind the cloud of his briar-root pipe.
So much, for the moment, for my two white companions, whose characters and
limitations will be further exposed, as surely as my own, as this narrative
proceeds.
But already we have enrolled certain retainers who may play no small part in
what is to come.
The first is a gigantic *** named Zambo, who is a black Hercules, as willing as any
horse, and about as intelligent.
Him we enlisted at Para, on the recommendation of the steamship company, on
whose vessels he had learned to speak a halting English.
It was at Para also that we engaged Gomez and Manuel, two half-breeds from up the
river, just come down with a cargo of redwood.
They were swarthy fellows, bearded and fierce, as active and wiry as panthers.
Both of them had spent their lives in those upper waters of the Amazon which we were
about to explore, and it was this recommendation which had caused Lord John
to engage them.
One of them, Gomez, had the further advantage that he could speak excellent
English.
These men were willing to act as our personal servants, to cook, to row, or to
make themselves useful in any way at a payment of fifteen dollars a month.
Besides these, we had engaged three Mojo Indians from Bolivia, who are the most
skilful at fishing and boat work of all the river tribes.
The chief of these we called Mojo, after his tribe, and the others are known as Jose
and Fernando.
Three white men, then, two half-breeds, one ***, and three Indians made up the
personnel of the little expedition which lay waiting for its instructions at Manaos
before starting upon its singular quest.
At last, after a weary week, the day had come and the hour.
I ask you to picture the shaded sitting- room of the Fazenda St. Ignatio, two miles
inland from the town of Manaos.
Outside lay the yellow, brassy glare of the sunshine, with the shadows of the palm
trees as black and definite as the trees themselves.
The air was calm, full of the eternal hum of insects, a tropical chorus of many
octaves, from the deep drone of the bee to the high, keen pipe of the mosquito.
Beyond the veranda was a small cleared garden, bounded with cactus hedges and
adorned with clumps of flowering shrubs, round which the great blue butterflies and
the tiny humming-birds fluttered and darted in crescents of sparkling light.
Within we were seated round the cane table, on which lay a sealed envelope.
Inscribed upon it, in the jagged handwriting of Professor Challenger, were
the words:-- "Instructions to Lord John Roxton and
party.
To be opened at Manaos upon July 15th, at 12 o'clock precisely."
Lord John had placed his watch upon the table beside him.
"We have seven more minutes," said he.
"The old dear is very precise." Professor Summerlee gave an acid smile as
he picked up the envelope in his gaunt hand.
"What can it possibly matter whether we open it now or in seven minutes?" said he.
"It is all part and parcel of the same system of quackery and nonsense, for which
I regret to say that the writer is notorious."
"Oh, come, we must play the game accordin' to rules," said Lord John.
"It's old man Challenger's show and we are here by his good will, so it would be
rotten bad form if we didn't follow his instructions to the letter."
"A pretty business it is!" cried the Professor, bitterly.
"It struck me as preposterous in London, but I'm bound to say that it seems even
more so upon closer acquaintance.
I don't know what is inside this envelope, but, unless it is something pretty
definite, I shall be much tempted to take the next down-river boat and catch the
Bolivia at Para.
After all, I have some more responsible work in the world than to run about
disproving the assertions of a lunatic. Now, Roxton, surely it is time."
"Time it is," said Lord John.
"You can blow the whistle." He took up the envelope and cut it with his
penknife. From it he drew a folded sheet of paper.
This he carefully opened out and flattened on the table.
It was a blank sheet. He turned it over.
Again it was blank.
We looked at each other in a bewildered silence, which was broken by a discordant
burst of derisive laughter from Professor Summerlee.
"It is an open admission," he cried.
"What more do you want? The fellow is a self-confessed humbug.
We have only to return home and report him as the brazen imposter that he is."
"Invisible ink!"
I suggested. "I don't think!" said Lord Roxton, holding
the paper to the light. "No, young fellah my lad, there is no use
deceiving yourself.
I'll go bail for it that nothing has ever been written upon this paper."
"May I come in?" boomed a voice from the veranda.
The shadow of a squat figure had stolen across the patch of sunlight.
That voice! That monstrous breadth of shoulder!
We sprang to our feet with a gasp of astonishment as Challenger, in a round,
boyish straw-hat with a colored ribbon-- Challenger, with his hands in his jacket-
pockets and his canvas shoes daintily
pointing as he walked--appeared in the open space before us.
He threw back his head, and there he stood in the golden glow with all his old
Assyrian luxuriance of beard, all his native insolence of drooping eyelids and
intolerant eyes.
"I fear," said he, taking out his watch, "that I am a few minutes too late.
When I gave you this envelope I must confess that I had never intended that you
should open it, for it had been my fixed intention to be with you before the hour.
The unfortunate delay can be apportioned between a blundering pilot and an intrusive
sandbank.
I fear that it has given my colleague, Professor Summerlee, occasion to
blaspheme."
"I am bound to say, sir," said Lord John, with some sternness of voice, "that your
turning up is a considerable relief to us, for our mission seemed to have come to a
premature end.
Even now I can't for the life of me understand why you should have worked it in
so extraordinary a manner."
Instead of answering, Professor Challenger entered, shook hands with myself and Lord
John, bowed with ponderous insolence to Professor Summerlee, and sank back into a
basket-chair, which creaked and swayed beneath his weight.
"Is all ready for your journey?" he asked. "We can start to-morrow."
"Then so you shall.
You need no chart of directions now, since you will have the inestimable advantage of
my own guidance.
From the first I had determined that I would myself preside over your
investigation.
The most elaborate charts would, as you will readily admit, be a poor substitute
for my own intelligence and advice.
As to the small ruse which I played upon you in the matter of the envelope, it is
clear that, had I told you all my intentions, I should have been forced to
resist unwelcome pressure to travel out with you."
"Not from me, sir!" exclaimed Professor Summerlee, heartily.
"So long as there was another ship upon the Atlantic."
Challenger waved him away with his great hairy hand.
"Your common sense will, I am sure, sustain my objection and realize that it was better
that I should direct my own movements and appear only at the exact moment when my
presence was needed.
That moment has now arrived. You are in safe hands.
You will not now fail to reach your destination.
From henceforth I take command of this expedition, and I must ask you to complete
your preparations to-night, so that we may be able to make an early start in the
morning.
My time is of value, and the same thing may be said, no doubt, in a lesser degree of
your own.
I propose, therefore, that we push on as rapidly as possible, until I have
demonstrated what you have come to see."
Lord John Roxton has chartered a large steam launch, the Esmeralda, which was to
carry us up the river.
So far as climate goes, it was immaterial what time we chose for our expedition, as
the temperature ranges from seventy-five to ninety degrees both summer and winter, with
no appreciable difference in heat.
In moisture, however, it is otherwise; from December to May is the period of the rains,
and during this time the river slowly rises until it attains a height of nearly forty
feet above its low-water mark.
It floods the banks, extends in great lagoons over a monstrous waste of country,
and forms a huge district, called locally the Gapo, which is for the most part too
marshy for foot-travel and too shallow for boating.
About June the waters begin to fall, and are at their lowest at October or November.
Thus our expedition was at the time of the dry season, when the great river and its
tributaries were more or less in a normal condition.
The current of the river is a slight one, the drop being not greater than eight
inches in a mile.
No stream could be more convenient for navigation, since the prevailing wind is
south-east, and sailing boats may make a continuous progress to the Peruvian
frontier, dropping down again with the current.
In our own case the excellent engines of the Esmeralda could disregard the sluggish
flow of the stream, and we made as rapid progress as if we were navigating a
stagnant lake.
For three days we steamed north-westwards up a stream which even here, a thousand
miles from its mouth, was still so enormous that from its center the two banks were
mere shadows upon the distant skyline.
On the fourth day after leaving Manaos we turned into a tributary which at its mouth
was little smaller than the main stream.
It narrowed rapidly, however, and after two more days' steaming we reached an Indian
village, where the Professor insisted that we should land, and that the Esmeralda
should be sent back to Manaos.
We should soon come upon rapids, he explained, which would make its further use
impossible.
He added privately that we were now approaching the door of the unknown
country, and that the fewer whom we took into our confidence the better it would be.
To this end also he made each of us give our word of honor that we would publish or
say nothing which would give any exact clue as to the whereabouts of our travels, while
the servants were all solemnly sworn to the same effect.
It is for this reason that I am compelled to be vague in my narrative, and I would
warn my readers that in any map or diagram which I may give the relation of places to
each other may be correct, but the points
of the compass are carefully confused, so that in no way can it be taken as an actual
guide to the country.
Professor Challenger's reasons for secrecy may be valid or not, but we had no choice
but to adopt them, for he was prepared to abandon the whole expedition rather than
modify the conditions upon which he would guide us.
It was August 2nd when we snapped our last link with the outer world by bidding
farewell to the Esmeralda.
Since then four days have passed, during which we have engaged two large canoes from
the Indians, made of so light a material (skins over a bamboo framework) that we
should be able to carry them round any obstacle.
These we have loaded with all our effects, and have engaged two additional Indians to
help us in the navigation.
I understand that they are the very two-- Ataca and Ipetu by name--who accompanied
Professor Challenger upon his previous journey.
They appeared to be terrified at the prospect of repeating it, but the chief has
patriarchal powers in these countries, and if the bargain is good in his eyes the
clansman has little choice in the matter.
So to-morrow we disappear into the unknown. This account I am transmitting down the
river by canoe, and it may be our last word to those who are interested in our fate.
I have, according to our arrangement, addressed it to you, my dear Mr. McArdle,
and I leave it to your discretion to delete, alter, or do what you like with it.
From the assurance of Professor Challenger's manner--and in spite of the
continued scepticism of Professor Summerlee--I have no doubt that our leader
will make good his statement, and that we
are really on the eve of some most remarkable experiences.
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