{"id":1143,"date":"2026-06-25T17:43:53","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T22:43:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aflorebooks.com\/?post_type=digital-library&p=1143"},"modified":"2026-06-27T16:24:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T21:24:08","slug":"chapter-5","status":"publish","type":"digital-library","link":"https:\/\/aflorebooks.com\/es\/digital-library\/the-lost-world\/chapter-5\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapter 5: Question!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
19\u201328 minutes<\/div>\n\n
4.452 words<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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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 demoralised 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\u2019s story, that it was of tremendous consequence, and that it would work up into inconceivable copy for the Gazette<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell,\u201d he cried, expectantly, \u201cwhat may it run to? I\u2019m thinking, young man, you have been in the wars. Don\u2019t tell me that he assaulted you.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe had a little difference at first.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat a man it is! What did you do?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, he became more reasonable and we had a chat. But I got nothing out of him\u2014nothing for publication.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m not so sure about that. You got a black eye out of him, and that\u2019s for publication. We can\u2019t have this reign of terror, Mr. Malone. We must bring the man to his bearings. I\u2019ll have a leaderette on him tomorrow that will raise a blister. Just give me the material and I will engage to brand the fellow forever. Professor Munchausen\u2014how\u2019s that for an inset headline? Sir John Mandeville redivivus\u2014Cagliostro\u2014all the imposters and bullies in history. I\u2019ll show him up for the fraud he is.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wouldn\u2019t do that, sir.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhy not?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBecause he is not a fraud at all.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat!\u201d roared McArdle. \u201cYou don\u2019t mean to say you really believe this stuff of his about mammoths and mastodons and great sea sairpents?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, I don\u2019t know about that. I don\u2019t think he makes any claims of that kind. But I do believe he has got something new.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThen for Heaven\u2019s sake, man, write it up!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019m longing to, but all I know he gave me in confidence and on condition that I didn\u2019t.\u201d I condensed into a few sentences the Professor\u2019s narrative. \u201cThat\u2019s how it stands.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

McArdle looked deeply incredulous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, Mr. Malone,\u201d he said at last, \u201cabout this scientific meeting tonight; there can be no privacy about that, anyhow. I don\u2019t 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\u2019ll be there in any case, so you\u2019ll just give us a pretty full report. I\u2019ll keep space up to midnight.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy dear chap, things don\u2019t happen like that in real life. People don\u2019t 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\u2019s all bosh.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut the American poet?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe never existed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI saw his sketchbook.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cChallenger\u2019s sketchbook.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou think he drew that animal?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOf course he did. Who else?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, then, the photographs?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere was nothing in the photographs. By your own admission you only saw a bird.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA pterodactyl.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat\u2019s what he<\/em> says. He put the pterodactyl into your head.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, then, the bones?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFirst 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I began to feel uneasy. Perhaps, after all, I had been premature in my acquiescence. Then I had a sudden happy thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWill you come to the meeting?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tarp Henry looked thoughtful.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHe is not a popular person, the genial Challenger,\u201d said he. \u201cA 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\u2019t want to get into a bear garden.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou might at least do him the justice to hear him state his own case.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWell, perhaps it\u2019s only fair. All right. I\u2019m your man for the evening.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 doorway, 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 behaviour of the audience at present was good-humoured, 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 honours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thus, when old Doctor Meldrum, with his well-known curly-brimmed opera hat, appeared upon the platform, there was such a universal query of \u201cWhere did<\/em> you get that tile?\u201d 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 rumoured abroad that the famous Professor would take part in the proceedings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a bird\u2019s-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\u2014or 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. (\u201cNo, no,\u201d from a sceptical student in the back row.) If the young gentleman in the red tie who cried \u201cNo, no,\u201d 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 tie. But had the process stopped? Was this gentleman to be taken as the final type\u2014the 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 sandbank, 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. \u201cHence, ladies and gentlemen,\u201d he added, \u201cthat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cQuestion!\u201d boomed a voice from the platform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acid humour, 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: \u201cWhich were extinct before the coming of man.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cQuestion!\u201d boomed the voice once more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI see!\u201d said Waldron, with a shrug. \u201cIt is my friend Professor Challenger,\u201d and amid laughter he renewed his lecture as if this was a final explanation and no more need be said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019 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\u2019s beard opened, before any sound could come forth, there was a yell of \u201cQuestion!\u201d from a hundred voices, and an answering counter cry of \u201cOrder!\u201d and \u201cShame!\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThis is really intolerable!\u201d he cried, glaring across the platform. \u201cI must ask you, Professor Challenger, to cease these ignorant and unmannerly interruptions.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI must in turn ask you, Mr. Waldron,\u201d he said, \u201cto cease to make assertions which are not in strict accordance with scientific fact.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The words unloosed a tempest. \u201cShame! Shame!\u201d \u201cGive him a hearing!\u201d \u201cPut him out!\u201d \u201cShove him off the platform!\u201d \u201cFair play!\u201d emerged from a general roar of amusement or execration. The chairman was on his feet flapping both his hands and bleating excitedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cProfessor Challenger\u2014personal\u2014views\u2014later,\u201d were the solid peaks above his clouds of inaudible mutter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At last the lecture came to an end\u2014I 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLadies and Gentlemen,\u201d he began, amid a sustained interruption from the back. \u201cI beg pardon\u2014Ladies, Gentlemen, and Children\u2014I must apologise, I had inadvertently omitted a considerable section of this audience\u201d (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), \u201cI 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\u201d (here he beamed and blinked at the lecturer) \u201cwill 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.\u201d (Ironical cheering.) \u201cPopular lecturers are in their nature parasitic.\u201d (Angry gesture of protest from Mr. Waldron.) \u201cThey 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.\u201d (At this point Mr. Waldron whispered to the chairman, who half rose and said something severely to his water carafe.) \u201cBut enough of this!\u201d (Loud and prolonged cheers.) \u201cLet me pass to some subject of wider interest. What is the particular point upon which I, as an original investigator, have challenged our lecturer\u2019s 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.\u201d (Cries of \u201cBosh!\u201d \u201cProve it!\u201d \u201cHow do you<\/em> know?\u201d \u201cQuestion!\u201d) \u201cHow do I know, you ask me? I know because I have visited their secret haunts. I know because I have seen some of them.\u201d (Applause, uproar, and a voice, \u201cLiar!\u201d) \u201cAm I a liar?\u201d (General hearty and noisy assent.) \u201cDid 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?\u201d (A voice, \u201cHere he is, sir!\u201d and an inoffensive little person in spectacles, struggling violently, was held up among a group of students.) \u201cDid you venture to call me a liar?\u201d (\u201cNo, sir, no!\u201d shouted the accused, and disappeared like a jack-in-the-box.) \u201cIf any person in this hall dares to doubt my veracity, I shall be glad to have a few words with him after the lecture.\u201d (\u201cLiar!\u201d) \u201cWho said that?\u201d (Again the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into the air.) \u201cIf I come down among you\u2014\u201d (General chorus of \u201cCome, love, come!\u201d 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.) \u201cEvery great discoverer has been met with the same incredulity\u2014the 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\u2014\u201d (Prolonged cheering and complete interruption.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI will not detain you,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is not worth it. Truth is truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men\u2014and, I fear I must add, of their equally foolish seniors\u2014cannot affect the matter. I claim that I have opened a new field of science. You dispute it.\u201d (Cheers.) \u201cThen 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?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor Challenger answered that they had.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mr. Summerlee: \u201cYes, I will.\u201d (Great cheering.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Professor Challenger: \u201cThen 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?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is thus that the great crisis of a man\u2019s 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\u2014was 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, \u201cSit down, Malone! Don\u2019t make a public ass of yourself.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI will go, Mr. Chairman,\u201d I kept repeating over and over again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cName! Name!\u201d cried the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy name is Edward Dunn Malone. I am the reporter of the Daily Gazette<\/em>. I claim to be an absolutely unprejudiced witness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat is your<\/em> name, sir?\u201d the chairman asked of my tall rival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am Lord John Roxton. I have already been up the Amazon, I know all the ground, and have special qualifications for this investigation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLord John Roxton\u2019s reputation as a sportsman and a traveller is, of course, world-famous,\u201d said the chairman; \u201cat the same time it would certainly be as well to have a member of the Press upon such an expedition.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThen I move,\u201d said Professor Challenger, \u201cthat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014down 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMr. Malone, I understand,\u201d said he. \u201cWe are to be companions\u2014what? 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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