What with the physical shocks incidental to my first interviewwith Professor Challenger and the mental ones which accompaniedthe second, I was a somewhat demoralized journalist by the time Ifound myself in Enmore Park once more. In my aching head the onethought was throbbing that there really was truth in this man'sstory, that it was of tremendous consequence, and that it wouldwork up into inconceivable copy for the Gazette when I couldobtain permission to use it. A taxicab was waiting at the end ofthe 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 heassaulted 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 gotnothing 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 aleaderette on him to-morrow that will raise a blister. Just giveme the material and I will engage to brand the fellow for ever. Professor Munchausen--how's that for an inset headline? Sir JohnMandeville redivivus--Cagliostro--all the imposters and bulliesin 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 reallybelieve this stuff of his about mammoths and mastodons and greatsea sairpents?"

"Well, I don't know about that. I don't think he makes anyclaims 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 oncondition that I didn't." I condensed into a few sentences theProfessor's narrative. "That's how it stands."

McArdle looked deeply incredulous.

"Well, Mr. Malone," he said at last, "about this scientificmeeting to-night; there can be no privacy about that, anyhow. I don't suppose any paper will want to report it, for Waldron hasbeen reported already a dozen times, and no one is aware thatChallenger 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 prettyfull report. I'll keep space up to midnight."

My day was a busy one, and I had an early dinner at the SavageClub with Tarp Henry, to whom I gave some account of my adventures. He listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roaredwith 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 losetheir evidence. Leave that to the novelists. The fellow is asfull 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 youonly 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 forthe occasion. If you are clever and know your business youcan fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph."

I began to feel uneasy. Perhaps, after all, I had been prematurein 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 heis about the best-hated man in London. If the medical studentsturn out there will be no end of a rag. I don't want to get intoa 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 forthe evening."

When we arrived at the hall we found a much greater concoursethan I had expected. A line of electric broughams dischargedtheir little cargoes of white-bearded professors, while the darkstream of humbler pedestrians, who crowded through the archeddoor-way, showed that the audience would be popular as wellas scientific. Indeed, it became evident to us as soon as we hadtaken our seats that a youthful and even boyish spirit was abroadin the gallery and the back portions of the hall. Looking behindme, 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 withan enthusiasm which was a strange prelude to a scientific lecture,and there was already a tendency to personal chaff which promiseda jovial evening to others, however embarrassing it might be tothe recipients of these dubious honors.

Thus, when old Doctor Meldrum, with his well-known curly-brimmedopera-hat, appeared upon the platform, there was such a universalquery of "Where DID you get that tile?" that he hurriedly removedit, and concealed it furtively under his chair. When goutyProfessor Wadley limped down to his seat there were generalaffectionate inquiries from all parts of the hall as to the exactstate of his poor toe, which caused him obvious embarrassment. The greatest demonstration of all, however, was at the entranceof my new acquaintance, Professor Challenger, when he passed down totake his place at the extreme end of the front row of the platform. Such a yell of welcome broke forth when his black beard firstprotruded round the corner that I began to suspect Tarp Henrywas right in his surmise, and that this assemblage was there notmerely for the sake of the lecture, but because it had got rumoredabroad that the famous Professor would take part in the proceedings.

There was some sympathetic laughter on his entrance among thefront benches of well-dressed spectators, as though thedemonstration of the students in this instance was not unwelcometo them. That greeting was, indeed, a frightful outburst ofsound, the uproar of the carnivora cage when the step of thebucket-bearing keeper is heard in the distance. There was anoffensive tone in it, perhaps, and yet in the main it struck meas mere riotous outcry, the noisy reception of one who amused andinterested them, rather than of one they disliked or despised. Challenger smiled with weary and tolerant contempt, as a kindlyman would meet the yapping of a litter of puppies. He sat slowlydown, blew out his chest, passed his hand caressingly down hisbeard, and looked with drooping eyelids and supercilious eyes atthe crowded hall before him. The uproar of his advent had notyet died away when Professor Ronald Murray, the chairman, and Mr.Waldron, the lecturer, threaded their way to the front, and theproceedings began.

Professor Murray will, I am sure, excuse me if I say that he hasthe common fault of most Englishmen of being inaudible. Why onearth people who have something to say which is worth hearingshould not take the slight trouble to learn how to make it heardis one of the strange mysteries of modern life. Their methodsare as reasonable as to try to pour some precious stuff from thespring to the reservoir through a non-conducting pipe, whichcould by the least effort be opened. Professor Murray madeseveral profound remarks to his white tie and to the water-carafeupon the table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to the silvercandlestick 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 aggressivemanner, but he had the merit of knowing how to assimilate theideas of other men, and to pass them on in a way which wasintelligible and even interesting to the lay public, with ahappy knack of being funny about the most unlikely objects,so that the precession of the Equinox or the formation of avertebrate 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, heunfolded before us. He told us of the globe, a huge mass offlaming gas, flaring through the heavens. Then he pictured thesolidification, the cooling, the wrinkling which formed themountains, the steam which turned to water, the slow preparationof the stage upon which was to be played the inexplicable dramaof life. On the origin of life itself he was discreetly vague. That the germs of it could hardly have survived the originalroasting was, he declared, fairly certain. Therefore it hadcome later. Had it built itself out of the cooling, inorganicelements of the globe? Very likely. Had the germs of it arrivedfrom outside upon a meteor? It was hardly conceivable. On thewhole, the wisest man was the least dogmatic upon the point. We could not--or at least we had not succeeded up to date inmaking organic life in our laboratories out of inorganic materials. The gulf between the dead and the living was something which ourchemistry could not as yet bridge. But there was a higher andsubtler chemistry of Nature, which, working with great forcesover long epochs, might well produce results which were impossiblefor 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 uprung by rung through reptiles and fishes, till at last we came toa kangaroo-rat, a creature which brought forth its young alive,the direct ancestor of all mammals, and presumably, therefore, ofeveryone in the audience. ("No, no," from a sceptical student inthe back row.) If the young gentleman in the red tie who cried"No, no," and who presumably claimed to have been hatched out ofan egg, would wait upon him after the lecture, he would be gladto see such a curiosity. (Laughter.) It was strange to think thatthe climax of all the age-long process of Nature had been the creationof that gentleman in the red tie. But had the process stopped? Was this gentleman to be taken as the final type--the be-all andend-all of development? He hoped that he would not hurt thefeelings 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 justifiedif they were to end entirely in his production. Evolution wasnot a spent force, but one still working, and even greaterachievements were in store.

Having thus, amid a general titter, played very prettily with hisinterrupter, the lecturer went back to his picture of the past,the drying of the seas, the emergence of the sand-bank, thesluggish, viscous life which lay upon their margins, theovercrowded lagoons, the tendency of the sea creatures to takerefuge 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 affrightour eyes when seen in the Wealden or in the Solenhofen slates,but which were fortunately extinct long before the firstappearance of mankind upon this planet."

"Question!" boomed a voice from the platform.

Mr. Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acidhumor, as exemplified upon the gentleman with the red tie, whichmade it perilous to interrupt him. But this interjectionappeared to him so absurd that he was at a loss how to dealwith it. So looks the Shakespearean who is confronted by arancid Baconian, or the astronomer who is assailed by a flat-earth fanatic. He paused for a moment, and then, raising hisvoice, repeated slowly the words: "Which were extinct beforethe coming of man."

"Question!" boomed the voice once more.

Waldron looked with amazement along the line of professors uponthe platform until his eyes fell upon the figure of Challenger,who leaned back in his chair with closed eyes and an amusedexpression, as if he were smiling in his sleep.

"I see!" said Waldron, with a shrug. "It is my friend ProfessorChallenger," and amid laughter he renewed his lecture as if thiswas a final explanation and no more need be said.

But the incident was far from being closed. Whatever path thelecturer took amid the wilds of the past seemed invariably tolead him to some assertion as to extinct or prehistoric lifewhich instantly brought the same bulls' bellow from the Professor. The audience began to anticipate it and to roar with delight whenit came. The packed benches of students joined in, and everytime Challenger's beard opened, before any sound could come forth,there was a yell of "Question!" from a hundred voices, and ananswering 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 longsentence, 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 andunmannerly interruptions."

There was a hush over the hall, the students rigid with delightat 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 makeassertions which are not in strict accordance with scientific fact."

The words unloosed a tempest. "Shame! Shame!" "Give him ahearing!" "Put him out!" "Shove him off the platform!" "Fairplay!" emerged from a general roar of amusement or execration. The chairman was on his feet flapping both his hands andbleating excitedly. "Professor Challenger--personal--views--later," were the solid peaks above his clouds of inaudible mutter. The interrupter bowed, smiled, stroked his beard, and relapsedinto his chair. Waldron, very flushed and warlike, continuedhis observations. Now and then, as he made an assertion, he shota venomous glance at his opponent, who seemed to be slumberingdeeply, with the same broad, happy smile upon his face.

At last the lecture came to an end--I am inclined to thinkthat it was a premature one, as the peroration was hurriedand disconnected. The thread of the argument had been rudelybroken, and the audience was restless and expectant. Waldron satdown, and, after a chirrup from the chairman, Professor Challengerrose and advanced to the edge of the platform. In the interestsof my paper I took down his speech verbatim.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," he began, amid a sustained interruptionfrom the back. "I beg pardon--Ladies, Gentlemen, and Children--Imust apologize, I had inadvertently omitted a considerablesection of this audience" (tumult, during which the Professorstood with one hand raised and his enormous head noddingsympathetically, as if he were bestowing a pontifical blessingupon the crowd), "I have been selected to move a vote of thanksto Mr. Waldron for the very picturesque and imaginative addressto which we have just listened. There are points in it withwhich I disagree, and it has been my duty to indicate them asthey arose, but, none the less, Mr. Waldron has accomplished hisobject well, that object being to give a simple and interestingaccount 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 whenI say that they are necessarily both superficial and misleading,since they have to be graded to the comprehension of anignorant audience." (Ironical cheering.) "Popular lecturersare in their nature parasitic." (Angry gesture of protest fromMr. Waldron.) "They exploit for fame or cash the work which hasbeen done by their indigent and unknown brethren. One smallestnew fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into thetemple of science, far outweighs any second-hand exposition whichpasses an idle hour, but can leave no useful result behind it. I put forward this obvious reflection, not out of any desire todisparage Mr. Waldron in particular, but that you may not loseyour sense of proportion and mistake the acolyte for the high priest." (At this point Mr. Waldron whispered to the chairman, who half roseand said something severely to his water-carafe.) "But enoughof this!" (Loud and prolonged cheers.) "Let me pass to somesubject of wider interest. What is the particular point uponwhich I, as an original investigator, have challenged ourlecturer's accuracy? It is upon the permanence of certain typesof animal life upon the earth. I do not speak upon this subjectas an amateur, nor, I may add, as a popular lecturer, but I speakas one whose scientific conscience compels him to adhere closelyto facts, when I say that Mr. Waldron is very wrong in supposingthat because he has never himself seen a so-called prehistoricanimal, therefore these creatures no longer exist. They areindeed, as he has said, our ancestors, but they are, if I may usethe expression, our contemporary ancestors, who can still befound with all their hideous and formidable characteristics ifone has but the energy and hardihood to seek their haunts. Creatures which were supposed to be Jurassic, monsters who wouldhunt 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 theirsecret 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 Iwas a liar? Will the person who called me a liar kindly stand upthat I may know him?" (A voice, "Here he is, sir!" and aninoffensive little person in spectacles, struggling violently,was held up among a group of students.) "Did you venture to callme a liar?" ("No, sir, no!" shouted the accused, and disappearedlike a jack-in-the-box.) "If any person in this hall dares todoubt my veracity, I shall be glad to have a few words with himafter the lecture." ("Liar!") "Who said that?" (Again theinoffensive 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 thechairman, standing up and waving both his arms, seemed to beconducting the music. The Professor, with his face flushed,his nostrils dilated, and his beard bristling, was now in aproper Berserk mood.) "Every great discoverer has been met withthe 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 canonly throw mud at the men who have risked their lives to open newfields 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 givelittle notion of the absolute chaos to which the assembly had bythis time been reduced. So terrific was the uproar that severalladies had already beaten a hurried retreat. Grave and reverendseniors seemed to have caught the prevailing spirit as badly asthe students, and I saw white-bearded men rising and shakingtheir fists at the obdurate Professor. The whole great audienceseethed and simmered like a boiling pot. The Professor took astep forward and raised both his hands. There was something sobig and arresting and virile in the man that the clatter andshouting died gradually away before his commanding gesture andhis 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 istruth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men--and, Ifear I must add, of their equally foolish seniors--cannot affectthe matter. I claim that I have opened a new field of science. You dispute it." (Cheers.) "Then I put you to the test. Will youaccredit one or more of your own number to go out as yourrepresentatives and test my statement in your name?"

Mr. Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, roseamong the audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with the witheredaspect of a theologian. He wished, he said, to ask ProfessorChallenger whether the results to which he had alluded in hisremarks had been obtained during a journey to the headwaters ofthe Amazon made by him two years before.

Professor Challenger answered that they had.

Mr. Summerlee desired to know how it was that ProfessorChallenger claimed to have made discoveries in those regionswhich had been overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previousexplorers of established scientific repute.

Professor Challenger answered that Mr. Summerlee appeared to beconfusing the Amazon with the Thames; that it was in reality asomewhat larger river; that Mr. Summerlee might be interested toknow that with the Orinoco, which communicated with it, somefifty thousand miles of country were opened up, and that in sovast a space it was not impossible for one person to find whatanother had missed.

Mr. Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fullyappreciated the difference between the Thames and the Amazon,which lay in the fact that any assertion about the former could betested, while about the latter it could not. He would be obligedif Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitudeof the country in which prehistoric animals were to be found.

Professor Challenger replied that he reserved such informationfor good reasons of his own, but would be prepared to give itwith proper precautions to a committee chosen from the audience. Would Mr. Summerlee serve on such a committee and test his storyin person?

Mr. Summerlee: "Yes, I will." (Great cheering.)

Professor Challenger: "Then I guarantee that I will place inyour hands such material as will enable you to find your way. It is only right, however, since Mr. Summerlee goes to check mystatement 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 topledge myself to a wilder adventure than had ever come to me inmy dreams? But Gladys--was it not the very opportunity of whichshe 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, mycompanion, was plucking at my skirts and I heard him whispering,"Sit down, Malone! Don't make a public ass of yourself." At thesame 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 backat 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 DailyGazette. 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 forthis investigation."

"Lord John Roxton's reputation as a sportsman and a traveler is,of course, world-famous," said the chairman; "at the same time itwould certainly be as well to have a member of the Press uponsuch an expedition."

"Then I move," said Professor Challenger, "that both thesegentlemen be elected, as representatives of this meeting, toaccompany Professor Summerlee upon his journey to investigate andto report upon the truth of my statements."

And so, amid shouting and cheering, our fate was decided, and Ifound myself borne away in the human current which swirledtowards the door, with my mind half stunned by the vast newproject which had risen so suddenly before it. As I emerged fromthe hall I was conscious for a moment of a rush of laughingstudents--down the pavement, and of an arm wielding a heavyumbrella, which rose and fell in the midst of them. Then, amid amixture of groans and cheers, Professor Challenger's electricbrougham slid from the curb, and I found myself walking under thesilvery lights of Regent Street, full of thoughts of Gladys andof wonder as to my future.

Suddenly there was a touch at my elbow. I turned, and foundmyself looking into the humorous, masterful eyes of the tall, thinman who had volunteered to be my companion on this strange quest.

"Mr. Malone, I understand," said he. "We are to becompanions--what? My rooms are just over the road, in the Albany. Perhaps you would have the kindness to spare me half an hour, forthere are one or two things that I badly want to say to you."