At the Earth’s Core

CONTENTS

PROLOG

In the first place please bear in mind that I do not expect you to believe thisstory. Nor could you wonder had you witnessed a recent experience of mine when,in the armor of blissful and stupendous ignorance, I gaily narrated the gist ofit to a Fellow of the Royal Geological Society on the occasion of my last tripto London.

You would surely have thought that I had been detected in no less a heinouscrime than the purloining of the Crown Jewels from the Tower, or putting poisonin the coffee of His Majesty the King.

The erudite gentleman in whom I confided congealed before I was halfthrough!—it is all that saved him from exploding—and my dreams of an HonoraryFellowship, gold medals, and a niche in the Hall of Fame faded into the thin,cold air of his arctic atmosphere.

But I believe the story, and so would you, and so would the learned Fellow ofthe Royal Geological Society, had you and he heard it from the lips of the manwho told it to me. Had you seen, as I did, the fire of truth in those grayeyes; had you felt the ring of sincerity in that quiet voice; had you realizedthe pathos of it all—you, too, would believe. You would not have needed thefinal ocular proof that I had—the weird rhamphorhynchus-like creature which hehad brought back with him from the inner world.

I came upon him quite suddenly, and no less unexpectedly, upon the rim of thegreat Sahara Desert. He was standing before a goat-skin tent amidst a clump ofdate palms within a tiny oasis. Close by was an Arab douar of some eight or tentents.

I had come down from the north to hunt lion. My party consisted of a dozenchildren of the desert—I was the only “white” man. As we approached the littleclump of verdure I saw the man come from his tent and with hand-shaded eyespeer intently at us. At sight of me he advanced rapidly to meet us.

“A white man!” he cried. “May the good Lord be praised! I have been watchi

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