The Lost World
"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 opium 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 cocks' 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."