and falling, the lights still hunting, the whispering high above me calling.
“Again crawling on dead arms and legs that moved — that moved — like the Ancient Mariner's ship — without volition of mine, but that carried me from a haunted place. And then — your fire — and this — safety!”
The crawling man smiled at us for a moment. Then swiftly life faded from his face. He slept.
That afternoon we struck camp and carrying the crawling man started back South. For three days we carried him and still he slept. And on the third day, still sleeping, he died. We built a great pile of wood and we burned his body as he had asked. We scattered his ashes about the forest with the ashes of the trees that had consumed him. It must be a great magic indeed that could disentangle those ashes and draw him back in a rushing cloud to the pit he called Accursed. I do not think that even the People of the Pit have such a spell. No.
But we did not return to the five peaks to see.
Arthur Conan Doyle
The Lost World
Chapter I. “There Are Heroisms All Round Us”
Chapter II. “Try Your Luck with Professor Challenger”
Chapter III. “He is a Perfectly Impossible Person”
Chapter IV. “It’s Just the very Biggest Thing in the World”
Chapter VI. “I was the Flail of the Lord”
Chapter VII. “To-morrow we Disappear into the Unknown”
Chapter VIII. “The Outlying Pickets of the New World”
Chapter IX. “Who could have Foreseen it?”
Chapter X. “The most Wonderful Things have Happened”
Chapter XI. “For once I was the Hero”
Chapter XII. “It was Dreadful in the Forest”
Chapter XIII. “A Sight which I shall Never Forget”
Chapter XIV. “Those Were the Real Conquests”
Chapter XV. “Our Eyes have seen Great Wonders”
Chapter XVI. “A Procession! A Procession!”
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.
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 E. D. Malone desires to state that both the injunction for restraint and the libel action have been withdrawn unreservedly by Professor G. E. Challenger, who, being satisfied that no criticism or comment in this book is meant in an offensive spirit, has guaranteed that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-inlaw. 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,
