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The Poison Belt by Arthur Conan Doyle

April, 1994  [Etext #126]


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THE POISON BELT BY ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE


Being an account of another adventure of
Prof. George E. Challenger, Lord John Roxton,
Prof. Summerlee, and Mr. E. D. Malone,
the discoverers of "The Lost World"





Chapter I

THE BLURRING OF LINES


It is imperative that now at once, while these stupendous events are still
clear in my mind, I should set them down with that exactness of detail
which time may blur.  But even as I do so, I am overwhelmed by the wonder
of the fact that it should be our little group of the "Lost World"--
Professor Challenger, Professor Summerlee, Lord John Roxton,
and myself--who have passed through this amazing experience.

When, some years ago, I chronicled in the Daily Gazette our epoch-making
journey in South America, I little thought that it should ever fall
to my lot to tell an even stranger personal experience, one which is
unique in all human annals and must stand out in the records of history
as a great peak among the humble foothills which surround it.
The event itself will always be marvellous, but the circumstances
that we four were together at the time of this extraordinary episode
came about in a most natural and, indeed, inevitable fashion.
I will explain the events which led up to it as shortly and as
clearly as I can, though I am well aware that the fuller the detail
upon such a subject the more welcome it will be to the reader,
for the public curiosity has been and still is insatiable.

It was upon Friday, the twenty-seventh of August--a date forever
memorable in the history of the world--that I went down to the office
of my paper and asked for three days' leave of absence from Mr. McArdle,
who still presided over our news department.  The good old Scotchman
shook his head, scratched his dwindling fringe of ruddy fluff,
and finally put his reluctance into words.

"I was thinking, Mr. Malone, that we could employ you to advantage
these days.  I was thinking there was a story that you are the only
man that could handle as it should be handled."

"I am sorry for that," said I, trying to hide my disappointment.
"Of course if I am needed, there is an end of the matter.
But the engagement was important and intimate.  If I could
be spared----"

"Well, I don't see that you can."

It was bitter, but I had to put the best face I could upon it.
After all, it was my own fault, for I should have known by this time
that a journalist has no right to make plans of his own.

"Then I'll think no more of it," said I with as much cheerfulness
as I could assume at so short a notice.  "What was it that you
wanted me to do?"

"Well, it was just to interview that deevil of a man down at Rotherfield."

"You don't mean Professor Challenger?"  I cried.

"Aye, it's just him that I do mean.  He ran young Alec Simpson
of the Courier a mile down the high road last week by the collar
of his coat and the slack of his breeches.  You'll have read
of it, likely, in the police report.  Our boys would as soon interview
a loose alligator in the zoo.  But you could do it, I'm thinking--
an old friend like you."

"Why," said I, greatly relieved, "this makes it all easy.
It so happens that it was to visit Professor Challenger at
Rotherfield that I was asking for leave of absence.  The fact is,
that it is the anniversary of our main adventure on the plateau
three years ago, and he has asked our whole party down to his house
to see him and celebrate the occasion."

"Capital!" cried McArdle, rubbing his hands and beaming through
his glasses.  "Then you will be able to get his opeenions out of him.
In any other man I would say it was all moonshine, but the fellow has
made good once, and who knows but he may again!"

"Get what out of him?"  I asked.  "What has he been doing?"

"Haven't you seen his letter on `Scientific Possibeelities'
in to-day's Times?"

"No."

McArdle dived down and picked a copy from the floor.

"Read it aloud," said he, indicating a column with his finger.
"I'd be glad to hear it again, for I am not sure now that I have
the man's meaning clear in my head."

This was the letter which I read to the news editor of the Gazette:--


"SCIENTIFIC POSSIBILITIES"

"Sir,--I have read with amusement, not wholly unmixed with some
less complimentary emotion, the complacent and wholly fatuous
letter of James Wilson MacPhail which has lately appeared in your
columns upon the subject of the blurring of Fraunhofer's lines
in the spectra both of the planets and of the fixed stars.
He dismisses the matter as of no significance.  To a wider intelligence
it may well seem of very great possible importance--so great as to
involve the ultimate welfare of every man, woman, and child upon
this planet.  I can hardly hope, by the use of scientific language,
to convey any sense of my meaning to those ineffectual people
who gather their ideas from the columns of a daily newspaper.
I will endeavour, therefore, to condescend to their limitation and
to indicate the situation by the use of a homely analogy which will
be within the limits of the intelligence of your readers."

"Man, he's a wonder--a living wonder!" said McArdle, shaking his
head reflectively.  "He'd put up the feathers of a sucking-dove
and set up a riot in a Quakers' meeting.  No wonder he has made London
too hot for him.  It's a peety, Mr. Malone, for it's a grand brain!
We'll let's have the analogy."

"We will suppose," I read, "that a small bundle of connected corks
was launched in a sluggish current upon a voyage across the Atlantic.
The corks drift slowly on from day to day with the same conditions
all round them.  If the corks were sentient we could imagine that
they would consider these conditions to be permanent and assured.
But we, with our superior knowledge, know that many things might happen
to surprise the corks.  They might possibly float up against a ship,
or a sleeping whale, or become entangled in seaweed.  In any case,
their voyage would probably end by their being thrown up on the rocky
coast of Labrador.  But what could they know of all this while they
drifted so gently day by day in what they thought was a limitless and
homogeneous ocean?

Your readers will possibly comprehend that the Atlantic,
in this parable, stands for the mighty ocean of ether through
which we drift and that the bunch of corks represents the little
and obscure planetary system to which we belong.  A third-rate sun,
with its rag tag and bobtail of insignificant satellites,
we float under the same daily conditions towards some unknown end,
some squalid catastrophe which will overwhelm us at the ultimate
confines of space, where we are swept over an etheric Niagara
or dashed upon some unthinkable Labrador.  I see no room here
for the shallow and ignorant optimism of your correspondent,
Mr. James Wilson MacPhail, but many reasons why we should watch
with a very close and interested attention every indication of change
in those cosmic surroundings upon which our own ultimate fate may depend."

"Man, he'd have made a grand meenister," said McArdle.
"It just booms like an organ.  Let's get doun to what it is that's
troubling him."

The general blurring and shifting of Fraunhofer's lines of the
spectrum point, in my opinion, to a widespread cosmic change of a
subtle and singular character.  Light from a planet is the reflected
light of the sun.  Light from a star is a self-produced light.
But the spectra both from planets and stars have, in this instance,
all undergone the same change.  Is it, then, a change in those
planets and stars?  To me such an idea is inconceivable.
What common change could simultaneously come upon them all?
Is it a change in our own atmosphere?  It is possible, but in the
highest degree improbable, since we see no signs of it around us,
and chemical analysis has failed to reveal it.  What, then, is the
third possibility?  That it may be a change in the conducting medium,
in that infinitely fine ether which extends from star to star
and pervades the whole universe.  Deep in that ocean we are
floating upon a slow current.  Might that current not drift us
into belts of ether which are novel and have properties of which we
have never conceived?  There is a change somewhere.  This cosmic
disturbance of the spectrum proves it.  It may be a good change.
It may be an evil one.  It may be a neutral one.  We do not know.
Shallow observers may treat the matter as one which can be disregarded,
but one who like myself is possessed of the deeper intelligence
of the true philosopher will understand that the possibilities
of the universe are incalculable and that the wisest man is he who
holds himself ready for the unexpected.  To take an obvious example,
who would undertake to say that the mysterious and universal outbreak
of illness, recorded in your columns this very morning as having
broken out among the indigenous races of Sumatra, has no connection
with some cosmic change to which they may respond more quickly
than the more complex peoples of Europe?  I throw out the idea
for what it is worth.  To assert it is, in the present stage,
as unprofitable as to deny it, but it is an unimaginative numskull
who is too dense to perceive that it is well within the bounds of
scientific possibility.

        "Yours faithfully,
             "GEORGE EDWARD CHALLENGER.

"THE BRIARS, ROTHERFIELD."


"It's a fine, steemulating letter," said McArdle thoughtfully,
fitting a cigarette into the long glass tube which he used as a holder.
"What's your opeenion of it, Mr. Malone?"

I had to confess my total and humiliating ignorance of the subject
at issue.  What, for example, were Fraunhofer's lines?
McArdle had just been studying the matter with the aid of our tame
scientist at the office, and he picked from his desk two of those
many-coloured spectral bands which bear a general resemblance
to the hat-ribbons of some young and ambitious cricket club.
He pointed out to me that there were certain black lines which formed
crossbars upon the series of brilliant colours extending from the red
at one end through gradations of orange, yellow, green, blue,
and indigo to the violet at the other.

"Those dark bands are Fraunhofer's lines," said he.  "The colours are
just light itself.  Every light, if you can split it up with a prism,
gives the same colours.  They tell us nothing.  It is the lines that count,
because they vary according to what it may be that produces the light.
It is these lines that have been blurred instead of clear this last week,
and all the astronomers have been quarreling over the reason.
Here's a photograph of the blurred lines for our issue to-morrow.
The public have taken no interest in the matter up to now,
but this letter of Challenger's in the Times will make them wake up,
I'm thinking."

"And this about Sumatra?"

"Well, it's a long cry from a blurred line in a spectrum to a sick
nigger in Sumatra.  And yet the chiel has shown us once before
that he knows what he's talking about.  There is some queer illness
down yonder, that's beyond all doubt, and to-day there's a cable
just come in from Singapore that the lighthouses are out of action
in the Straits of Sundan, and two ships on the beach in consequence.
Anyhow, it's good enough for you to interview Challenger upon.
If you get anything definite, let us have a column by Monday."

I was coming out from the news editor's room, turning over my new mission
in my mind, when I heard my name called from the waiting-room below.
It was a telegraph-boy with a wire which had been forwarded from
my lodgings at Streatham.  The message was from the very man we
had been discussing, and ran thus:--

Malone, 17, Hill Street, Streatham.--Bring oxygen.--Challenger.

"Bring oxygen!"  The Professor, as I remembered him, had an elephantine
sense of humour capable of the most clumsy and unwieldly gambollings.
Was this one of those jokes which used to reduce him to uproarious
laughter, when his eyes would disappear and he was all gaping mouth
and wagging beard, supremely indifferent to the gravity of all
around him?  I turned the words over, but could make nothing even
remotely jocose out of them.  Then surely it was a concise order--
though a very strange one.  He was the last man in the world
whose deliberate command I should care to disobey.  Possibly some
chemical experiment was afoot; possibly----Well, it was no business
of mine to speculate upon why he wanted it.  I must get it.
There was nearly an hour before I should catch the train at Victoria.
I took a taxi, and having ascertained the address from the telephone book,
I made for the Oxygen Tube Supply Company in Oxford Street.

As I alighted on the pavement at my destination, two youths emerged
from the door of the establishment carrying an iron cylinder, which,
with some trouble, they hoisted into a waiting motor-car. An elderly man
was at their heels scolding and directing in a creaky, sardonic voice.
He turned towards me.  There was no mistaking those austere features
and that goatee beard.  It was my old cross-grained companion,
Professor Summerlee.

"What!" he cried.  "Don't tell me that YOU have had one of these
preposterous telegrams for oxygen?"

I exhibited it.

"Well, well!  I have had one too, and, as you see, very much
against the grain, I have acted upon it.  Our good friend is
as impossible as ever.  The need for oxygen could not have been
so urgent that he must desert the usual means of supply and encroach
upon the time of those who are really busier than himself.
Why could he not order it direct?"

I could only suggest that he probably wanted it at once.

"Or thought he did, which is quite another matter.  But it is superfluous
now for you to purchase any, since I have this considerable supply."

"Still, for some reason he seems to wish that I should bring oxygen too.
It will be safer to do exactly what he tells me."

Accordingly, in spite of many grumbles and remonstrances from Summerlee,
I ordered an additional tube, which was placed with the other
in his motor-car, for he had offered me a lift to Victoria.

I turned away to pay off my taxi, the driver of which was very cantankerous
and abusive over his fare.  As I came back to Professor Summerlee,
he was having a furious altercation with the men who had carried down
the oxygen, his little white goat's beard jerking with indignation.
One of the fellows called him, I remember, "a silly old bleached cockatoo,"
which so enraged his chauffeur that he bounded out of his seat
to take the part of his insulted master, and it was all we could
do to prevent a riot in the street.

These little things may seem trivial to relate, and passed as mere
incidents at the time.  It is only now, as I look back, that I see
their relation to the whole story which I have to unfold.

The chauffeur must, as it seemed to me, have been a novice or else
have lost his nerve in this disturbance, for he drove vilely on
the way to the station.  Twice we nearly had collisions with other
equally erratic vehicles, and I remember remarking to Summerlee
that the standard of driving in London had very much declined.
Once we brushed the very edge of a great crowd which was watching
a fight at the corner of the Mall.  The people, who were much excited,
raised cries of anger at the clumsy driving, and one fellow sprang
upon the step and waved a stick above our heads.  I pushed him off,
but we were glad when we had got clear of them and safe out of the park.
These little events, coming one after the other, left me very jangled
in my nerves, and I could see from my companion's petulant manner that
his own patience had got to a low ebb.

But our good humour was restored when we saw Lord John Roxton waiting
for us upon the platform, his tall, thin figure clad in a yellow
tweed shooting-suit. His keen face, with those unforgettable eyes,
so fierce and yet so humorous, flushed with pleasure at the sight of us.
His ruddy hair was shot with grey, and the furrows upon his brow
had been cut a little deeper by Time's chisel, but in all else he was
the Lord John who had been our good comrade in the past.

"Hullo, Herr Professor!  Hullo, young fella!" he shouted as he came
toward us.

He roared with amusement when he saw the oxygen cylinders upon
the porter's trolly behind us.  "So you've got them too!" he cried.
"Mine is in the van.  Whatever can the old dear be after?"

"Have you seen his letter in the Times?"  I asked.

"What was it?"

"Stuff and nonsense!" said Summerlee Harshly.

"Well, it's at the bottom of this oxygen business, or I am mistaken,"
said I.

"Stuff and nonsense!" cried Summerlee again with quite
unnecessary violence.  We had all got into a first-class smoker,
and he had already lit the short and charred old briar
pipe which seemed to singe the end of his long, aggressive nose.

"Friend Challenger is a clever man," said he with great vehemence.
"No one can deny it.  It's a fool that denies it.  Look at his hat.
There's a sixty-ounce brain inside it--a big engine, running smooth,
and turning out clean work.  Show me the engine-house and I'll
tell you the size of the engine.  But he is a born charlatan--
you've heard me tell him so to his face--a born charlatan,
with a kind of dramatic trick of jumping into the limelight.
Things are quiet, so friend Challenger sees a chance to set
the public talking about him.  You don't imagine that he seriously
believes all this nonsense about a change in the ether and a danger
to the human race?  Was ever such a cock-and-bull story in
this life?"

He sat like an old white raven, croaking and shaking
with sardonic laughter.

A wave of anger passed through me as I listened to Summerlee.
It was disgraceful that he should speak thus of the leader who had been
the source of all our fame and given us such an experience as no men
have ever enjoyed.  I had opened my mouth to utter some hot retort,
when Lord John got before me.

"You had a scrap once before with old man Challenger,"
said he sternly, "and you were down and out inside ten seconds.
It seems to me, Professor Summerlee, he's beyond your class,
and the best you can do with him is to walk wide and leave
him alone."

"Besides," said I, "he has been a good friend to every one of us.
Whatever his faults may be, he is as straight as a line,
and I don't believe he ever speaks evil of his comrades behind
their backs."

"Well said, young fellah-my-lad," said Lord John Roxton.  Then, with a
kindly smile, he slapped Professor Summerlee upon his shoulder.
"Come, Herr Professor, we're not going to quarrel at this time of day.
We've seen too much together.  But keep off the grass when you get
near Challenger, for this young fellah and I have a bit of a weakness
for the old dear."

But Summerlee was in no humour for compromise.  His face was screwed
up in rigid disapproval, and thick curls of angry smoke rolled up
from his pipe.

"As to you, Lord John Roxton," he creaked, "your opinion upon
a matter of science is of as much value in my eyes as my views upon
a new type of shot-gun would be in yours.  I have my own judgment,
sir, and I use it in my own way.  Because it has misled me once,
is that any reason why I should accept without criticism anything,
however far-fetched, which this man may care to put forward?
Are we to have a Pope of science, with infallible decrees laid down
EX CATHEDRA, and accepted without question by the poor humble public?
I tell you, sir, that I have a brain of my own and that I
should feel myself to be a snob and a slave if I did not use it.
If it pleases you to believe this rigmarole about ether and Fraunhofer's
lines upon the spectrum, do so by all means, but do not ask one
who is older and wiser than yourself to share in your folly.
Is it not evident that if the ether were affected to the degree
which he maintains, and if it were obnoxious to human health,
the result of it would already be apparent upon ourselves?"
Here he laughed with uproarious triumph over his own argument.
"Yes, sir, we should already be very far from our normal selves,
and instead of sitting quietly discussing scientific problems
in a railway train we should be showing actual symptoms of the
poison which was working within us.  Where do we see any signs
of this poisonous cosmic disturbance?  Answer me that, sir!
Answer me that!  Come, come, no evasion!  I pin you to
an answer!"

I felt more and more angry.  There was something very irritating
and aggressive in Summerlee's demeanour.

"I think that if you knew more about the facts you might be less
positive in your opinion," said I.

Summerlee took his pipe from his mouth and fixed me with a stony stare.

"Pray what do you mean, sir, by that somewhat impertinent observation?"

"I mean that when I was leaving the office the news editor told
me that a telegram had come in confirming the general illness
of the Sumatra natives, and adding that the lights had not been
lit in the Straits of Sunda."

"Really, there should be some limits to human folly!" cried Summerlee
in a positive fury.  "Is it possible that you do not realize that ether,
if for a moment we adopt Challenger's preposterous supposition,
is a universal substance which is the same here as at the other
side of the world?  Do you for an instant suppose that there is
an English ether and a Sumatran ether?  Perhaps you imagine that
the ether of Kent is in some way superior to the ether of Surrey,
through which this train is now bearing us.  There really are no
bounds to the credulity and ignorance of the average layman.
Is it conceivable that the ether in Sumatra should be so deadly
as to cause total insensibility at the very time when the ether here
has had no appreciable effect upon us whatever?  Personally, I can
truly say that I never felt stronger in body or better balanced
in mind in my life."

"That may be.  I don't profess to be a scientific man," said I,
"though I have heard somewhere that the science of one generation
is usually the fallacy of the next.  But it does not take much
common sense to see that, as we seem to know so little about ether,
it might be affected by some local conditions in various parts
of the world and might show an effect over there which would only
develop later with us."

"With `might' and `may' you can prove anything,"
cried Summerlee furiously.  "Pigs may fly.  Yes, sir, pigs MAY fly--
but they don't. It is not worth arguing with you.  Challenger has
filled you with his nonsense and you are both incapable of reason.
I had as soon lay arguments before those railway cushions."

"I must say, Professor Summerlee, that your manners do not seem
to have improved since I last had the pleasure of meeting you,"
said Lord John severely.

"You lordlings are not accustomed to hear the truth," Summerlee answered
with a bitter smile.  "It comes as a bit of a shock, does it not,
when someone makes you realize that your title leaves you none
the less a very ignorant man?"

"Upon my word, sir," said Lord John, very stern and rigid, "if you
were a younger man you would not dare to speak to me in so offensive
a fashion."

Summerlee thrust out his chin, with its little wagging tuft
of goatee beard.

"I would have you know, sir, that, young or old, there has
never been a time in my life when I was afraid to speak my mind
to an ignorant coxcomb--yes, sir, an ignorant coxcomb, if you
had as many titles as slaves could invent and fools could adopt."

For a moment Lord John's eyes blazed, and then, with a tremendous effort,
he mastered his anger and leaned back in his seat with arms folded
and a bitter smile upon his face.  To me all this was dreadful
and deplorable.  Like a wave, the memory of the past swept over me,
the good comradeship, the happy, adventurous days--all that we had
suffered and worked for and won.  That it should have come to this--
to insults and abuse!  Suddenly I was sobbing--sobbing in loud,
gulping, uncontrollable sobs which refused to be concealed.
My companions looked at me in surprise.  I covered my face with
my hands.

"It's all right," said I. "Only--only it IS such a pity!"

"You're ill, young fellah, that's what's amiss with you," said Lord John.
"I thought you were queer from the first."

"Your habits, sir, have not mended in these three years," said Summerlee,
shaking his head.  "I also did not fail to observe your strange manner
the moment we met.  You need not waste your sympathy, Lord John.
These tears are purely alcoholic.  The man has been drinking.
By the way, Lord John, I called you a coxcomb just now, which was perhaps
unduly severe.  But the word reminds me of a small accomplishment,
trivial but amusing, which I used to possess.  You know me
as the austere man of science.  Can you believe that I once had a
well-deserved reputation in several nurseries as a farmyard imitator?
Perhaps I can help you to pass the time in a pleasant way.
Would it amuse you to hear me crow like a cock?"

"No, sir," said Lord John, who was still greatly offended,
"it would NOT amuse me."

"My imitation of the clucking hen who had just laid an egg was
also considered rather above the average.  Might I venture?"

"No, sir, no--certainly not."

But in spite of this earnest prohibition, Professor Summerlee laid
down his pipe and for the rest of our journey he entertained--
or failed to entertain--us by a succession of bird and animal cries
which seemed so absurd that my tears were suddenly changed into
boisterous laughter, which must have become quite hysterical as I
sat opposite this grave Professor and saw him--or rather heard him--
in the character of the uproarious rooster or the puppy whose tail
had been trodden upon.  Once Lord John passed across his newspaper,
upon the margin of which he had written in pencil, "Poor devil!
Mad as a hatter."  No doubt it was very eccentric, and yet the performance
struck me as extraordinarily clever and amusing.

Whilst this was going on, Lord John leaned forward and told me some
interminable story about a buffalo and an Indian rajah which seemed
to me to have neither beginning nor end.  Professor Summerlee
had just begun to chirrup like a canary, and Lord John to get
to the climax of his story, when the train drew up at Jarvis Brook,
which had been given us as the station for Rotherfield.

And there was Challenger to meet us.  His appearance was glorious.
Not all the turkey-cocks in creation could match the slow,
high-stepping dignity with which he paraded his own railway station
and the benignant smile of condescending encouragement with which
he regarded everybody around him.  If he had changed in anything
since the days of old, it was that his points had become accentuated.
The huge head and broad sweep of forehead, with its plastered lock
of black hair, seemed even greater than before.  His black beard
poured forward in a more impressive cascade, and his clear grey eyes,
with their insolent and sardonic eyelids, were even more masterful than
of yore.

He gave me the amused hand-shake and encouraging smile which the head
master bestows upon the small boy, and, having greeted the others
and helped to collect their bags and their cylinders of oxygen,
he stowed us and them away in a large motor-car which was driven
by the same impassive Austin, the man of few words, whom I had seen
in the character of butler upon the occasion of my first eventful
visit to the Professor.  Our journey led us up a winding hill through
beautiful country.  I sat in front with the chauffeur, but behind
me my three comrades seemed to me to be all talking together.
Lord John was still struggling with his buffalo story,
so far as I could make out, while once again I heard, as of old,
the deep rumble of Challenger and the insistent accents of Summerlee
as their brains locked in high and fierce scientific debate.
Suddenly Austin slanted his mahogany face toward me without taking his
eyes from his steering-wheel.

"I'm under notice," said he.

"Dear me!" said I.

Everything seemed strange to-day. Everyone said queer, unexpected things.
It was like a dream.

"It's forty-seven times," said Austin reflectively.

"When do you go?"  I asked, for want of some better observation.
"I don't go," said Austin.

The conversation seemed to have ended there, but presently he came
back to it.

"If I was to go, who would look after 'im?"  He jerked his head
toward his master.  "Who would 'e get to serve 'im?"

"Someone else," I suggested lamely.

"Not 'e.  No one would stay a week.  If I was to go,
that 'ouse would run down like a watch with the mainspring out.
I'm telling you because you're 'is friend, and you ought to know.
If I was to take 'im at 'is word--but there, I wouldn't have the 'eart.
'E and the missus would be like two babes left out in a bundle.
I'm just everything.  And then 'e goes and gives me notice."

"Why would no one stay?"  I asked.

"Well, they wouldn't make allowances, same as I do.  'E's a very
clever man, the master--so clever that 'e's clean balmy sometimes.
I've seen 'im right off 'is onion, and no error.  Well, look what 'e
did this morning."

"What did he do?"

Austin bent over to me.

"'E bit the 'ousekeeper," said he in a hoarse whisper.

"Bit her?"

"Yes, sir.  Bit 'er on the leg.  I saw 'er with my own eyes startin'
a marathon from the 'all-door."

"Good gracious!"  "So you'd say, sir, if you could see some
of the goings on.  'E don't make friends with the neighbors.
There's some of them thinks that when 'e was up among those monsters
you wrote about, it was just `'Ome, Sweet 'Ome' for the master,
and 'e was never in fitter company.  That's what THEY say.
But I've served 'im ten years, and I'm fond of 'im, and, mind you, 'e's a
great man, when all's said an' done, and it's an honor to serve 'im.
But 'e does try one cruel at times.  Now look at that, sir.
That ain't what you might call old-fashioned 'ospitality, is it now?
Just you read it for yourself."

The car on its lowest speed had ground its way up a steep, curving ascent.
At the corner a notice-board peered over a well-clipped hedge.
As Austin said, it was not difficult to read, for the words were few
and arresting:--

                 |---------------------------------------|
                 |               WARNING.                |
                 |                ----                   |
                 |  Visitors, Pressmen, and Mendicants   |
                 |        are not encouraged.            |
                 |                                       |
                 |                  G. E. CHALLENGER.    |
                 |_______________________________________|


"No, it's not what you might call 'earty," said Austin,
shaking his head and glancing up at the deplorable placard.
"It wouldn't look well in a Christmas card.  I beg your pardon,
sir, for I haven't spoke as much as this for many a long year,
but to-day my feelings seem to 'ave got the better of me.  'E can sack
me till 'e's blue in the face, but I ain't going, and that's flat.
I'm 'is man and 'e's my master, and so it will be, I expect,
to the end of the chapter."

We had passed between the white posts of a gate and up a curving drive,
lined with rhododendron bushes.  Beyond stood a low brick house,
picked out with white woodwork, very comfortable and pretty.
Mrs. Challenger, a small, dainty, smiling figure, stood in the open
doorway to welcome us.

"Well, my dear," said Challenger, bustling out of the car,
"here are our visitors.  It is something new for us to have visitors,
is it not?  No love lost between us and our neighbors, is there?
If they could get rat poison into our baker's cart, I expect it would
be there."

"It's dreadful--dreadful!" cried the lady, between laughter and tears.
"George is always quarreling with everyone.  We haven't a friend on
the countryside."

"It enables me to concentrate my attention upon my incomparable wife,"
said Challenger, passing his short, thick arm round her waist.
Picture a gorilla and a gazelle, and you have the pair of them.
"Come, come, these gentlemen are tired from the journey, and luncheon
should be ready.  Has Sarah returned?"

The lady shook her head ruefully, and the Professor laughed loudly
and stroked his beard in his masterful fashion.

"Austin," he cried, "when you have put up the car you will kindly
help your mistress to lay the lunch.  Now, gentlemen, will you
please step into my study, for there are one or two very urgent
things which I am anxious to say to you."



Chapter II

THE TIDE OF DEATH


As we crossed the hall the telephone-bell rang, and we were the involuntary
auditors of Professor Challenger's end of the ensuing dialogue.
I say "we," but no one within a hundred yards could have failed
to hear the booming of that monstrous voice, which reverberated
through the house.  His answers lingered in my mind.

"Yes, yes, of course, it is I.... Yes, certainly, THE Professor Challenger,
the famous Professor, who else?... Of course, every word of it,
otherwise I should not have written it.... I shouldn't be surprised....
There is every indication of it.... Within a day or so at the
furthest.... Well, I can't help that, can I?... Very unpleasant, no doubt,
but I rather fancy it will affect more important people than you.
There is no use whining about it.... No, I couldn't possibly.
You must take your chance.... That's enough, sir.  Nonsense!  I have
something more important to do than to listen to such twaddle."

He shut off with a crash and led us upstairs into a large airy
apartment which formed his study.  On the great mahogany desk
seven or eight unopened telegrams were lying.

"Really," he said as he gathered them up, "I begin to think that it would
save my correspondents' money if I were to adopt a telegraphic address.
Possibly `Noah, Rotherfield,' would be the most appropriate."

As usual when he made an obscure joke, he leaned against the desk
and bellowed in a paroxysm of laughter, his hands shaking
so that he could hardly open the envelopes.

"Noah!  Noah!" he gasped, with a face of beetroot, while Lord John
and I smiled in sympathy and Summerlee, like a dyspeptic goat,
wagged his head in sardonic disagreement.  Finally Challenger,
still rumbling and exploding, began to open his telegrams.
The three of us stood in the bow window and occupied ourselves
in admiring the magnificent view.

It was certainly worth looking at.  The road in its gentle curves
had really brought us to a considerable elevation--seven hundred feet,
as we afterwards discovered.  Challenger's house was on the very edge
of the hill, and from its southern face, in which was the study window,
one looked across the vast stretch of the weald to where the gentle
curves of the South Downs formed an undulating horizon.
In a cleft of the hills a haze of smoke marked the position of Lewes.
Immediately at our feet there lay a rolling plain of heather,
with the long, vivid green stretches of the Crowborough golf course,
all dotted with the players.  A little to the south, through an opening
in the woods, we could see a section of the main line from London
to Brighton.  In the immediate foreground, under our very noses,
was a small enclosed yard, in which stood the car which had brought
us from the station.

An ejaculation from Challenger caused us to turn.  He had read
his telegrams and had arranged them in a little methodical
pile upon his desk.  His broad, rugged face, or as much of it
as was visible over the matted beard, was still deeply flushed,
and he seemed to be under the influence of some strong excitement.

"Well, gentlemen," he said, in a voice as if he was addressing
a public meeting, "this is indeed an interesting reunion, and it takes
place under extraordinary--I may say unprecedented--circumstances.
May I ask if you have observed anything upon your journey from town?"

"The only thing which I observed," said Summerlee with a sour smile,
"was that our young friend here has not improved in his manners
during the years that have passed.  I am sorry to state that I
have had to seriously complain of his conduct in the train, and I
should be wanting in frankness if I did not say that it has left
a most unpleasant impression in my mind."

"Well, well, we all get a bit prosy sometimes," said Lord John.
"The young fellah meant no real harm.  After all, he's an International,
so if he takes half an hour to describe a game of football he has more
right to do it than most folk."

"Half an hour to describe a game!"  I cried indignantly.
"Why, it was you that took half an hour with some long-winded story
about a buffalo.  Professor Summerlee will be my witness."

"I can hardly judge which of you was the most utterly wearisome,"
said Summerlee.  "I declare to you, Challenger, that I never wish
to hear of football or of buffaloes so long as I live."

"I have never said one word to-day about football," I protested.

Lord John gave a shrill whistle, and Summerlee shook his head sadly.

"So early in the day too," said he.  "It is indeed deplorable.
As I sat there in sad but thoughtful silence----"

"In silence!" cried Lord John.  "Why, you were doin' a music-hall
turn of imitations all the way--more like a runaway gramophone
than a man."

Summerlee drew himself up in bitter protest.

"You are pleased to be facetious, Lord John," said he with a face
of vinegar.

"Why, dash it all, this is clear madness," cried Lord John.
"Each of us seems to know what the others did and none of us knows
what he did himself.  Let's put it all together from the first.
We got into a first-class smoker, that's clear, ain't it?
Then we began to quarrel over friend Challenger's letter in
the Times."

"Oh, you did, did you?" rumbled our host, his eyelids beginning
to droop.

"You said, Summerlee, that there was no possible truth in his contention."

"Dear me!" said Challenger, puffing out his chest and stroking his beard.
"No possible truth!  I seem to have heard the words before.
And may I ask with what arguments the great and famous Professor
Summerlee proceeded to demolish the humble individual who had ventured
to express an opinion upon a matter of scientific possibility?
Perhaps before he exterminates that unfortunate nonentity he will
condescend to give some reasons for the adverse views which he
has formed."

He bowed and shrugged and spread open his hands as he spoke
with his elaborate and elephantine sarcasm.

"The reason was simple enough," said the dogged Summerlee.
"I contended that if the ether surrounding the earth was so toxic
in one quarter that it produced dangerous symptoms, it was hardly likely
that we three in the railway carriage should be entirely unaffected."

The explanation only brought uproarious merriment from Challenger.
He laughed until everything in the room seemed to rattle and quiver.

"Our worthy Summerlee is, not for the first time, somewhat out
of touch with the facts of the situation," said he at last,
mopping his heated brow.  "Now, gentlemen, I cannot make my point
better than by detailing to you what I have myself done this morning.
You will the more easily condone any mental abberation upon your own
part when you realize that even I have had moments when my balance
has been disturbed.  We have had for some years in this household
a housekeeper--one Sarah, with whose second name I have never attempted
to burden my memory.  She is a woman of a severe and forbidding aspect,
prim and demure in her bearing, very impassive in her nature,
and never known within our experience to show signs of any emotion.
As I sat alone at my breakfast--Mrs. Challenger is in the habit
of keeping her room of a morning--it suddenly entered my head
that it would be entertaining and instructive to see whether
I could find any limits to this woman's inperturbability.
I devised a simple but effective experiment.  Having upset a small vase
of flowers which stood in the centre of the cloth, I rang the bell
and slipped under the table.  She entered and, seeing the room empty,
imagined that I had withdrawn to the study.  As I had expected,
she approached and leaned over the table to replace the vase.
I had a vision of a cotton stocking and an elastic-sided boot.
Protruding my head, I sank my teeth into the calf of her leg.
The experiment was successful beyond belief.  For some moments
she stood paralyzed, staring down at my head.  Then with a shriek
she tore herself free and rushed from the room.  I pursued her
with some thoughts of an explanation, but she flew down the drive,
and some minutes afterwards I was able to pick her out with my
field-glasses traveling very rapidly in a south-westerly direction.
I tell you the anecdote for what it is worth.  I drop it into
your brains and await its germination.  Is it illuminative?
Has it conveyed anything to your minds?  What do YOU think of it,
Lord John?"

Lord John shook his head gravely.

"You'll be gettin' into serious trouble some of these days if you
don't put a brake on," said he.

"Perhaps you have some observation to make, Summerlee?"

"You should drop all work instantly, Challenger, and take
three months in a German watering-place," said he.

"Profound!  Profound!" cried Challenger.  "Now, my young friend,
is it possible that wisdom may come from you where your seniors have
so signally failed?"

And it did.  I say it with all modesty, but it did.  Of course,
it all seems obvious enough to you who know what occurred, but it
was not so very clear when everything was new.  But it came on me
suddenly with the full force of absolute conviction.

"Poison!"  I cried.

Then, even as I said the word, my mind flashed back over the whole
morning's experiences, past Lord John with his buffalo, past my own
hysterical tears, past the outrageous conduct of Professor Summerlee,
to the queer happenings in London, the row in the park,
the driving of the chauffeur, the quarrel at the oxygen warehouse.
Everything fitted suddenly into its place.

"Of course," I cried again.  "It is poison.  We are all poisoned."

"Exactly," said Challenger, rubbing his hands, "we are all poisoned.
Our planet has swum into the poison belt of ether, and is now flying
deeper into it at the rate of some millions of miles a minute.
Our young friend has expressed the cause of all our troubles and
perplexities in a single word, `poison.'"

We looked at each other in amazed silence.  No comment seemed
to meet the situation.

"There is a mental inhibition by which such symptoms can be checked
and controlled," said Challenger.  "I cannot expect to find it
developed in all of you to the same point which it has reached in me,
for I suppose that the strength of our different mental processes bears
some proportion to each other.  But no doubt it is appreciable even
in our young friend here.  After the little outburst of high spirits
which so alarmed my domestic I sat down and reasoned with myself.
I put it to myself that I had never before felt impelled to bite
any of my household.  The impulse had then been an abnormal one.
In an instant I perceived the truth.  My pulse upon examination
was ten beats above the usual, and my reflexes were increased.
I called upon my higher and saner self, the real G. E. C., seated
serene and impregnable behind all mere molecular disturbance.
I summoned him, I say, to watch the foolish mental tricks
which the poison would play.  I found that I was indeed
the master.  I could recognize and control a disordered mind.
It was a remarkable exhibition of the victory of mind over matter,
for it was a victory over that particular form of matter which is
most intimately connected with mind.  I might almost say that mind
was at fault and that personality controlled it.  Thus, when my
wife came downstairs and I was impelled to slip behind the door
and alarm her by some wild cry as she entered, I was able to
stifle the impulse and to greet her with dignity and restraint.
An overpowering desire to quack like a duck was met and mastered in the
same fashion.

Later, when I descended to order the car and found Austin bending
over it absorbed in repairs, I controlled my open hand even after I
had lifted it and refrained from giving him an experience which would
possibly have caused him to follow in the steps of the housekeeper.
On the contrary, I touched him on the shoulder and ordered the car
to be at the door in time to meet your train.  At the present instant I
am most forcibly tempted to take Professor Summerlee by that silly old
beard of his and to shake his head violently backwards and forwards.
And yet, as you see, I am perfectly restrained.  Let me commend my
example to you."

"I'll look out for that buffalo," said Lord John.

"And I for the football match."  "It may be that you are right,
Challenger," said Summerlee in a chastened voice.  "I am willing
to admit that my turn of mind is critical rather than constructive
and that I am not a ready convert to any new theory, especially when it
happens to be so unusual and fantastic as this one.  However, as I
cast my mind back over the events of the morning, and as I reconsider
the fatuous conduct of my companions, I find it easy to believe
that some poison of an exciting kind was responsible for their symptoms."

Challenger slapped his colleague good-humouredly upon the shoulder.
"We progress," said he.  "Decidedly we progress."

"And pray, sir," asked Summerlee humbly, "what is your opinion
as to the present outlook?"

"With your permission I will say a few words upon that subject."
He seated himself upon his desk, his short, stumpy legs swinging in
front of him.  "We are assisting at a tremendous and awful function.
It is, in my opinion, the end of the world."

The end of the world!  Our eyes turned to the great bow-window
and we looked out at the summer beauty of the country-side, the long
slopes of heather, the great country-houses, the cozy farms,
the pleasure-seekers upon the links.

The end of the world!  One had often heard the words, but the idea
that they could ever have an immediate practical significance,
that it should not be at some vague date, but now, to-day, that
was a tremendous, a staggering thought.  We were all struck
solemn and waited in silence for Challenger to continue.
His overpowering presence and appearance lent such force to
the solemnity of his words that for a moment all the crudities
and absurdities of the man vanished, and he loomed before us
as something majestic and beyond the range of ordinary humanity.
Then to me, at least, there came back the cheering recollection of
how twice since we had entered the room he had roared with laughter.
Surely, I thought, there are limits to mental detachment.
The crisis cannot be so great or so pressing after all.

`You will conceive a bunch of grapes," said he, "which are covered
by some infinitesimal but noxious bacillus.  The gardener passes it
through a disinfecting medium.  It may be that he desires his grapes
to be cleaner.  It may be that he needs space to breed some fresh
bacillus less noxious than the last.  He dips it into the poison
and they are gone.  Our Gardener is, in my opinion, about to dip
the solar system, and the human bacillus, the little mortal vibrio
which twisted and wriggled upon the outer rind of the earth,
will in an instant be sterilized out of existence."

Again there was silence.  It was broken by the high trill
of the telephone-bell.

"There is one of our bacilli squeaking for help," said he with a
grim smile.  "They are beginning to realize that their continued
existence is not really one of the necessities of the universe."

He was gone from the room for a minute or two.  I remember that none
of us spoke in his absence.  The situation seemed beyond all words
or comments.

"The medical officer of health for Brighton," said he when he returned.
"The symptoms are for some reason developing more rapidly upon the
sea level.  Our seven hundred feet of elevation give us an advantage.
Folk seem to have learned that I am the first authority upon
the question.  No doubt it comes from my letter in the Times.
That was the mayor of a provincial town with whom I talked when we
first arrived.  You may have heard me upon the telephone.
He seemed to put an entirely inflated value upon his own life.
I helped him to readjust his ideas."

Summerlee had risen and was standing by the window.  His thin,
bony hands were trembling with his emotion.

"Challenger," said he earnestly, "this thing is too serious for mere
futile argument.  Do not suppose that I desire to irritate you
by any question I may ask.  But I put it to you whether there
may not be some fallacy in your information or in your reasoning.
There is the sun shining as brightly as ever in the blue sky.
There are the heather and the flowers and the birds.
There are the folk enjoying themselves upon the golf-links and
the laborers yonder cutting the corn.  You tell us that they and we
may be upon the very brink of destruction--that this sunlit day
may be that day of doom which the human race has so long awaited.
So far as we know, you found this tremendous judgment upon what?
Upon some abnormal lines in a spectrum--upon rumours from Sumatra--
upon some curious personal excitement which we have discerned
in each other.  This latter symptom is not so marked but that you
and we could, by a deliberate effort, control it.  You need
not stand on ceremony with us, Challenger.  We have all faced
death together before now.  Speak out, and let us know exactly
where we stand, and what, in your opinion, are our prospects for
our future."

It was a brave, good speech, a speech from that stanch and strong
spirit which lay behind all the acidities and angularities
of the old zoologist.  Lord John rose and shook him by the hand.

"My sentiment to a tick," said he.  "Now, Challenger, it's up to you
to tell us where we are.  We ain't nervous folk, as you know well;
but when it comes to makin' a week-end visit and finding you've run
full butt into the Day of Judgment, it wants a bit of explainin'.
What's the danger, and how much of it is there, and what are we goin'
to do to meet it?"

He stood, tall and strong, in the sunshine at the window, with his
brown hand upon the shoulder of Summerlee.  I was lying back in
an armchair, an extinguished cigarette between my lips, in that sort
of half-dazed state in which impressions become exceedingly distinct.
It may have been a new phase of the poisoning, but the delirious
promptings had all passed away and were succeeded by an exceedingly
languid and, at the same time, perceptive state of mind.
I was a spectator.  It did not seem to be any personal concern of mine.
But here were three strong men at a great crisis, and it was fascinating
to observe them.  Challenger bent his heavy brows and stroked his
beard before he answered.  One could see that he was very carefully
weighing his words.

"What was the last news when you left London?" he asked.

"I was at the Gazette office about ten," said I. "There was a Reuter
just come in from Singapore to the effect that the sickness seemed
to be universal in Sumatra and that the lighthouses had not been
lit in consequence."

"Events have been moving somewhat rapidly since then,"
said Challenger, picking up his pile of telegrams.  "I am in close
touch both with the authorities and with the press, so that news
is converging upon me from all parts.  There is, in fact,
a general and very insistent demand that I should come to London;
but I see no good end to be served.  From the accounts the poisonous
effect begins with mental excitement; the rioting in Paris this
morning is said to have been very violent, and the Welsh colliers are
in a state of uproar.  So far as the evidence to hand can be trusted,
this stimulative stage, which varies much in races and in individuals,
is succeeded by a certain exaltation and mental lucidity--I seem
to discern some signs of it in our young friend here--which, after an
appreciable interval, turns to coma, deepening rapidly into death.
I fancy, so far as my toxicology carries me, that there are some
vegetable nerve poisons----"

"Datura," suggested Summerlee.  "Excellent!" cried Challenger.
"It would make for scientific precision if we named our toxic agent.
Let it be daturon.  To you, my dear Summerlee, belongs the honour--
posthumous, alas, but none the less unique--of having given a name
to the universal destroyer, the Great Gardener's disinfectant.
The symptoms of daturon, then, may be taken to be such as I indicate.
That it will involve the whole world and that no life can possibly remain
behind seems to me to be certain, since ether is a universal medium.
Up to now it has been capricious in the places which it has attacked,
but the difference is only a matter of a few hours, and it is like
an advancing tide which covers one strip of sand and then another,
running hither and thither in irregular streams, until at last it
has submerged it all.  There are laws at work in connection with
the action and distribution of daturon which would have been of deep
interest had the time at our disposal permitted us to study them.
So far as I can trace them"--here he glanced over his telegrams--"the
less developed races have been the first to respond to its influence.
There are deplorable accounts from Africa, and the Australian aborigines
appear to have been already exterminated.  The Northern races have
as yet shown greater resisting power than the Southern.  This, you see,
is dated from Marseilles at nine-forty-five this morning.  I give
it to you verbatim:--

"`All night delirious excitement throughout Provence.
Tumult of vine growers at Nimes.  Socialistic upheaval at Toulon.
Sudden illness attended by coma attacked population this morning.
PESTE FOUDROYANTE.  Great numbers of dead in the streets.  Paralysis of
business and universal chaos.'

"An hour later came the following, from the same source:--

"`We are threatened with utter extermination.  Cathedrals and
churches full to overflowing.  The dead outnumber the living.
It is inconceivable and horrible.  Decease seems to be painless,
but swift and inevitable.'  "There is a similar telegram from Paris,
where the development is not yet as acute.  India and Persia
appear to be utterly wiped out.  The Slavonic population of
Austria is down, while the Teutonic has hardly been affected.
Speaking generally, the dwellers upon the plains and upon
the seashore seem, so far as my limited information goes, to have
felt the effects more rapidly than those inland or on the heights.
Even a little elevation makes a considerable difference, and perhaps
if there be a survivor of the human race, he will again be found
upon the summit of some Ararat.  Even our own little hill may
presently prove to be a temporary island amid a sea of disaster.
But at the present rate of advance a few short hours will submerge
us all."

Lord John Roxton wiped his brow.

"What beats me," said he, "is how you could sit there laughin'
with that stack of telegrams under your hand.  I've seen death as often
as most folk, but universal death--it's awful!"

"As to the laughter," said Challenger, "you will bear in mind that,
like yourselves, I have not been exempt from the stimulating
cerebral effects of the etheric poison.  But as to the horror
with which universal death appears to inspire you, I would put it
to you that it is somewhat exaggerated.  If you were sent to sea
alone in an open boat to some unknown destination, your heart
might well sink within you.  The isolation, the uncertainty,
would oppress you.  But if your voyage were made in a goodly ship,
which bore within it all your relations and your friends, you would
feel that, however uncertain your destination might still remain,
you would at least have one common and simultaneous experience
which would hold you to the end in the same close communion.
A lonely death may be terrible, but a universal one, as painless
as this would appear to be, is not, in my judgment, a matter
for apprehension.  Indeed, I could sympathize with the person who took
the view that the horror lay in the idea of surviving when all that
is learned, famous, and exalted had passed away."

"What, then, do you propose to do?" asked Summerlee, who had for once
nodded his assent to the reasoning of his brother scientist.

"To take our lunch," said Challenger as the boom of a gong sounded
through the house.  "We have a cook whose omelettes are only excelled
by her cutlets.  We can but trust that no cosmic disturbance has
dulled her excellent abilities.  My Scharzberger of '96 must also
be rescued, so far as our earnest and united efforts can do it,
from what would be a deplorable waste of a great vintage."
He levered his great bulk off the desk, upon which he had sat
while he announced the doom of the planet.  "Come," said he.
"If there is little time left, there is the more need that we should
spend it in sober and reasonable enjoyment."

And, indeed, it proved to be a very merry meal.  It is true that we
could not forget our awful situation.  The full solemnity of the event
loomed ever at the back of our minds and tempered our thoughts.
But surely it is the soul which has never faced death which
shies strongly from it at the end.  To each of us men it had,
for one great epoch in our lives, been a familiar presence.
As to the lady, she leaned upon the strong guidance of her mighty
husband and was well content to go whither his path might lead.
The future was our fate.  The present was our own.  We passed
it in goodly comradeship and gentle merriment.  Our minds were,
as I have said, singularly lucid.  Even I struck sparks at times.
As to Challenger, he was wonderful!  Never have I so realized the elemental
greatness of the man, the sweep and power of his understanding.
Summerlee drew him on with his chorus of subacid criticism,
while Lord John and I laughed at the contest and the lady, her hand
upon his sleeve, controlled the bellowings of the philosopher.
Life, death, fate, the destiny of man--these were the stupendous
subjects of that memorable hour, made vital by the fact that as
the meal progressed strange, sudden exaltations in my mind and
tinglings in my limbs proclaimed that the invisible tide of death
was slowly and gently rising around us.  Once I saw Lord John put
his hand suddenly to his eyes, and once Summerlee dropped back
for an instant in his chair.  Each breath we breathed was charged
with strange forces.  And yet our minds were happy and at ease.
Presently Austin laid the cigarettes upon the table and was about
to withdraw.

"Austin!" said his master.

"Yes, sir?"

"I thank you for your faithful service."  A smile stole over
the servant's gnarled face.

"I've done my duty, sir."

"I'm expecting the end of the world to-day, Austin."

"Yes, sir.  What time, sir?"

"I can't say, Austin.  Before evening."

"Very good, sir."

The taciturn Austin saluted and withdrew.  Challenger lit a cigarette,
and, drawing his chair closer to his wife's, he took her hand in his.

"You know how matters stand, dear," said he.  "I have explained it
also to our friends here.  You're not afraid are you?"

"It won't be painful, George?"

"No more than laughing-gas at the dentist's. Every time you have
had it you have practically died."

"But that is a pleasant sensation."

"So may death be.  The worn-out bodily machine can't record its impression,
but we know the mental pleasure which lies in a dream or a trance.
Nature may build a beautiful door and hang it with many a gauzy
and shimmering curtain to make an entrance to the new life for our
wondering souls.  In all my probings of the actual, I have always
found wisdom and kindness at the core; and if ever the frightened
mortal needs tenderness, it is surely as he makes the passage
perilous from life to life.  No, Summerlee, I will have none
of your materialism, for I, at least, am too great a thing to end
in mere physical constituents, a packet of salts and three bucketfuls
of water.  Here--here"--and he beat his great head with his huge,
hairy fist--"there is something which uses matter, but is not of it--
something which might destroy death, but which death can never destroy."

"Talkin' of death," said Lord John.  "I'm a Christian of sorts,
but it seems to me there was somethin' mighty natural in those ancestors
of ours who were buried with their axes and bows and arrows and the like,
same as if they were livin' on just the same as they used to.
I don't know," he added, looking round the table in a shamefaced way,
"that I wouldn't feel more homely myself if I was put away
with my old .450 Express and the fowlin'-piece, the shorter
one with the rubbered stock, and a clip or two of cartridges--
just a fool's fancy, of course, but there it is.  How does it strike you,
Herr Professor?"

"Well," said Summerlee, "since you ask my opinion, it strikes
me as an indefensible throwback to the Stone Age or before it.
I'm of the twentieth century myself, and would wish to die like a
reasonable civilized man.  I don't know that I am more afraid of death
than the rest of you, for I am an oldish man, and, come what may,
I can't have very much longer to live; but it is all against my nature
to sit waiting without a struggle like a sheep for the butcher.
Is it quite certain, Challenger, that there is nothing we
can do?"

"To save us--nothing," said Challenger.  "To prolong our lives a few
hours and thus to see the evolution of this mighty tragedy before we
are actually involved in it--that may prove to be within my powers.
I have taken certain steps----"

"The oxygen?"

"Exactly.  The oxygen."

"But what can oxygen effect in the face of a poisoning of the ether?
There is not a greater difference in quality between a brick-bat
and a gas than there is between oxygen and ether.  They are
different planes of matter.  They cannot impinge upon one another.
Come, Challenger, you could not defend such a proposition."

"My good Summerlee, this etheric poison is most certainly influenced
by material agents.  We see it in the methods and distribution
of the outbreak.  We should not A PRIORI have expected it, but it
is undoubtedly a fact.  Hence I am strongly of opinion that a gas
like oxygen, which increases the vitality and the resisting power
of the body, would be extremely likely to delay the action of what you
have so happily named the daturon.  It may be that I am mistaken,
but I have every confidence in the correctness of my reasoning."

"Well," said Lord John, "if we've got to sit suckin' at those tubes
like so many babies with their bottles, I'm not takin' any."

"There will be no need for that," Challenger answered.
"We have made arrangements--it is to my wife that you chiefly owe it--
that her boudoir shall be made as airtight as is practicable.
With matting and varnished paper."  "Good heavens, Challenger, you don't
suppose you can keep out ether with varnished paper?"

"Really, my worthy friend, you are a trifle perverse in missing the point.
It is not to keep out the ether that we have gone to such trouble.
It is to keep in the oxygen.  I trust that if we can ensure an atmosphere
hyper-oxygenated to a certain point, we may be able to retain our senses.
I had two tubes of the gas and you have brought me three more.
It is not much, but it is something."

"How long will they last?"

"I have not an idea.  We will not turn them on until our symptoms
become unbearable.  Then we shall dole the gas out as it is
urgently needed.  It may give us some hours, possibly even some days,
on which we may look out upon a blasted world.  Our own fate is
delayed to that extent, and we will have the very singular experience,
we five, of being, in all probability, the absolute rear guard
of the human race upon its march into the unknown.  Perhaps you
will be kind enough now to give me a hand with the cylinders.
It seems to me that the atmosphere already grows somewhat
more oppressive."



Chapter III

SUBMERGED


The chamber which was destined to be the scene of our unforgettable
experience was a charmingly feminine sitting-room, some fourteen
or sixteen feet square.  At the end of it, divided by a curtain
of red velvet, was a small apartment which formed the Professor's
dressing-room. This in turn opened into a large bedroom.
The curtain was still hanging, but the boudoir and dressing-room
could be taken as one chamber for the purposes of our experiment.
One door and the window frame had been plastered round with varnished
paper so as to be practically sealed.  Above the other door,
which opened on to the landing, there hung a fanlight which could
be drawn by a cord when some ventilation became absolutely necessary.
A large shrub in a tub stood in each corner.

"How to get rid of our excessive carbon dioxide without unduly wasting
our oxygen is a delicate and vital question," said Challenger,
looking round him after the five iron tubes had been laid side
by side against the wall.  "With longer time for preparation I could
have brought the whole concentrated force of my intelligence to bear
more fully upon the problem, but as it is we must do what we can.
The shrubs will be of some small service.  Two of the oxygen tubes
are ready to be turned on at an instant's notice, so that we cannot
be taken unawares.  At the same time, it would be well not to go far
from the room, as the crisis may be a sudden and urgent one."

There was a broad, low window opening out upon a balcony.
The view beyond was the same as that which we had already admired from
the study.  Looking out, I could see no sign of disorder anywhere.
There was a road curving down the side of the hill, under my very eyes.
A cab from the station, one of those prehistoric survivals which
are only to be found in our country villages, was toiling slowly
up the hill.  Lower down was a nurse girl wheeling a perambulator
and leading a second child by the hand.  The blue reeks of smoke
from the cottages gave the whole widespread landscape an air
of settled order and homely comfort.  Nowhere in the blue heaven
or on the sunlit earth was there any foreshadowing of a catastrophe.
The harvesters were back in the fields once more and the golfers,
in pairs and fours, were still streaming round the links.
There was so strange a turmoil within my own head, and such a jangling
of my overstrung nerves, that the indifference of those people
was amazing.

"Those fellows don't seem to feel any ill effects," said I,
pointing down at the links.

"Have you played golf?" asked Lord John.

"No, I have not."

"Well, young fellah, when you do you'll learn that once
fairly out on a round, it would take the crack of doom
to stop a true golfer.  Halloa!  There's that telephone-bell again."

From time to time during and after lunch the high, insistent ring
had summoned the Professor.  He gave us the news as it came through
to him in a few curt sentences.  Such terrific items had never
been registered in the world's history before.  The great shadow
was creeping up from the south like a rising tide of death.
Egypt had gone through its delirium and was now comatose.
Spain and Portugal, after a wild frenzy in which the Clericals and
the Anarchists had fought most desperately, were now fallen silent.
No cable messages were received any longer from South America.
In North America the southern states, after some terrible racial rioting,
had succumbed to the poison.  North of Maryland the effect
was not yet marked, and in Canada it was hardly perceptible.
Belgium, Holland, and Denmark had each in turn been affected.
Despairing messages were flashing from every quarter to the great centres
of learning, to the chemists and the doctors of world-wide repute,
imploring their advice.  The astronomers too were deluged with inquiries.
Nothing could be done.  The thing was universal and beyond our human
knowledge or control.  It was death--painless but inevitable--
death for young and old, for weak and strong, for rich and poor,
without hope or possibility of escape.  Such was the news which,
in scattered, distracted messages, the telephone had brought us.
The great cities already knew their fate and so far as we could
gather were preparing to meet it with dignity and resignation.
Yet here were our golfers and laborers like the lambs who gambol
under the shadow of the knife.  It seemed amazing.  And yet how
could they know?  It had all come upon us in one giant stride.
What was there in the morning paper to alarm them?  And now it was
but three in the afternoon.  Even as we looked some rumour seemed
to have spread, for we saw the reapers hurrying from the fields.
Some of the golfers were returning to the club-house. They
were running as if taking refuge from a shower.  Their little
caddies trailed behind them.  Others were continuing their game.
The nurse had turned and was pushing her perambulator hurriedly
up the hill again.  I noticed that she had her hand to her brow.
The cab had stopped and the tired horse, with his head sunk
to his knees, was resting.  Above there was a perfect summer sky--
one huge vault of unbroken blue, save for a few fleecy white clouds
over the distant downs.  If the human race must die to-day, it
was at least upon a glorious death-bed. And yet all that gentle
loveliness of nature made this terrific and wholesale destruction
the more pitiable and awful.  Surely it was too goodly a residence
that we should be so swiftly, so ruthlessly, evicted from
it!

But I have said that the telephone-bell had rung once more.
Suddenly I heard Challenger's tremendous voice from the hall.

"Malone!" he cried.  "You are wanted."  I rushed down to the instrument.
It was McArdle speaking from London.

"That you, Mr. Malone?" cried his familiar voice.  "Mr. Malone,
there are terrible goings-on in London.  For God's sake, see if
Professor Challenger can suggest anything that can be done."

"He can suggest nothing, sir," I answered.  "He regards the crisis
as universal and inevitable.  We have some oxygen here, but it can
only defer our fate for a few hours."

"Oxygen!" cried the agonized voice.  "There is no time to get any.
The office has been a perfect pandemonium ever since you
left in the morning.  Now half of the staff are insensible.
I am weighed down with heaviness myself.  From my window I can see
the people lying thick in Fleet Street.  The traffic is all held up.
Judging by the last telegrams, the whole world----"

His voice had been sinking, and suddenly stopped.  An instant
later I heard through the telephone a muffled thud, as if his head
had fallen forward on the desk.

"Mr. McArdle!"  I cried.  "Mr. McArdle!"

There was no answer.  I knew as I replaced the receiver that I
should never hear his voice again.

At that instant, just as I took a step backwards from the telephone,
the thing was on us.  It was as if we were bathers, up to our
shoulders in water, who suddenly are submerged by a rolling wave.
An invisible hand seemed to have quietly closed round my throat
and to be gently pressing the life from me.  I was conscious of
immense oppression upon my chest, great tightness within my head,
a loud singing in my ears, and bright flashes before my eyes.
I staggered to the balustrades of the stair.  At the same moment,
rushing and snorting like a wounded buffalo, Challenger dashed
past me, a terrible vision, with red-purple face, engorged eyes,
and bristling hair.  His little wife, insensible to all appearance,
was slung over his great shoulder, and he blundered and thundered
up the stair, scrambling and tripping, but carrying himself
and her through sheer will-force through that mephitic atmosphere
to the haven of temporary safety.  At the sight of his effort I
too rushed up the steps, clambering, falling, clutching at the rail,
until I tumbled half senseless upon by face on the upper landing.
Lord John's fingers of steel were in the collar of my coat,
and a moment later I was stretched upon my back, unable to speak
or move, on the boudoir carpet.  The woman lay beside me,
and Summerlee was bunched in a chair by the window, his head
nearly touching his knees.  As in a dream I saw Challenger,
like a monstrous beetle, crawling slowly across the floor,
and a moment later I heard the gentle hissing of the escaping oxygen.
Challenger breathed two or three times with enormous gulps, his lungs
roaring as he drew in the vital gas.

"It works!" he cried exultantly.  "My reasoning has been justified!"
He was up on his feet again, alert and strong.  With a tube
in his hand he rushed over to his wife and held it to her face.
In a few seconds she moaned, stirred, and sat up.  He turned to me,
and I felt the tide of life stealing warmly through my arteries.
My reason told me that it was but a little respite, and yet,
carelessly as we talk of its value, every hour of existence
now seemed an inestimable thing.  Never have I known such
a thrill of sensuous joy as came with that freshet of life.
The weight fell away from my lungs, the band loosened from my brow,
a sweet feeling of peace and gentle, languid comfort stole over me.
I lay watching Summerlee revive under the same remedy, and finally
Lord John took his turn.  He sprang to his feet and gave me a hand
to rise, while Challenger picked up his wife and laid her on
the settee.

"Oh, George, I am so sorry you brought me back," she said,
holding him by the hand.  "The door of death is indeed, as you said,
hung with beautiful, shimmering curtains; for, once the choking
feeling had passed, it was all unspeakably soothing and beautiful.
Why have you dragged me back?"

"Because I wish that we make the passage together.  We have been together
so many years.  It would be sad to fall apart at the supreme moment."

For a moment in his tender voice I caught a glimpse of a new Challenger,
something very far from the bullying, ranting, arrogant man
who had alternately amazed and offended his generation.
Here in the shadow of death was the innermost Challenger,
the man who had won and held a woman's love.  Suddenly his mood
changed and he was our strong captain once again.

"Alone of all mankind I saw and foretold this catastrophe,"
said he with a ring of exultation and scientific triumph in his voice.
"As to you, my good Summerlee, I trust your last doubts have been
resolved as to the meaning of the blurring of the lines in the spectrum
and that you will no longer contend that my letter in the Times was
based upon a delusion."

For once our pugnacious colleague was deaf to a challenge.
He could but sit gasping and stretching his long, thin limbs,
as if to assure himself that he was still really upon this planet.
Challenger walked across to the oxygen tube, and the sound of the loud
hissing fell away till it was the most gentle sibilation.

"We must husband our supply of the gas," said he.  "The atmosphere
of the room is now strongly hyperoxygenated, and I take it that none
of us feel any distressing symptoms.  We can only determine by actual
experiments what amount added to the air will serve to neutralize
the poison.  Let us see how that will do."

We sat in silent nervous tension for five minutes or more,
observing our own sensations.  I had just begun to fancy that I
felt the constriction round my temples again when Mrs. Challenger
called out from the sofa that she was fainting.  Her husband turned
on more gas.

"In pre-scientific days," said he, "they used to keep a white mouse
in every submarine, as its more delicate organization gave signs
of a vicious atmosphere before it was perceived by the sailors.
You, my dear, will be our white mouse.  I have now increased
the supply and you are better."

"Yes, I am better."

"Possibly we have hit upon the correct mixture.  When we have ascertained
exactly how little will serve we shall be able to compute how long we
shall be able to exist.  Unfortunately, in resuscitating ourselves
we have already consumed a considerable proportion of this first tube."

"Does it matter?" asked Lord John, who was standing with his hands
in his pockets close to the window.  "If we have to go, what is
the use of holdin' on?  You don't suppose there's any chance for us?"

Challenger smiled and shook his head.

"Well, then, don't you think there is more dignity in takin'
the jump and not waitin' to he pushed in?  If it must be so,
I'm for sayin' our prayers, turnin' off the gas, and openin'
the window."

"Why not?" said the lady bravely.  "Surely, George, Lord John
is right and it is better so."

"I most strongly object," cried Summerlee in a querulous voice.
"When we must die let us by all means die, but to deliberately anticipate
death seems to me to be a foolish and unjustifiable action."

"What does our young friend say to it?" asked Challenger.

"I think we should see it to the end."

"And I am strongly of the same opinion," said he.

"Then, George, if you say so, I think so too," cried the lady.

"Well, well, I'm only puttin' it as an argument," said Lord John.
"If you all want to see it through I am with you.  It's dooced
interestin', and no mistake about that.  I've had my share of adventures
in my life, and as many thrills as most folk, but I'm endin'
on my top note."

"Granting the continuity of life," said Challenger.

"A large assumption!" cried Summerlee.  Challenger stared at him
in silent reproof.

"Granting the continuity of life," said he, in his most didactic manner,
"none of us can predicate what opportunities of observation one may
have from what we may call the spirit plane to the plane of matter.
It surely must be evident to the most obtuse person" (here he glared
a Summerlee) "that it is while we are ourselves material that we are
most fitted to watch and form a judgment upon material phenomena.
Therefore it is only by keeping alive for these few extra hours
that we can hope to carry on with us to some future existence
a clear conception of the most stupendous event that the world,
or the universe so far as we know it, has ever encountered.
To me it would seem a deplorable thing that we should in any way
curtail by so much as a minute so wonderful an experience."

"I am strongly of the same opinion," cried Summerlee.

"Carried without a division," said Lord John.  "By George, that poor devil
of a chauffeur of yours down in the yard has made his last journey.
No use makin' a sally and bringin' him in?"

"It would be absolute madness," cried Summerlee.

"Well, I suppose it would," said Lord John.  "It couldn't help him
and would scatter our gas all over the house, even if we ever got
back alive.  My word, look at the little birds under the trees!"

We drew four chairs up to the long, low window, the lady still resting
with closed eyes upon the settee.  I remember that the monstrous
and grotesque idea crossed my mind--the illusion may have been
heightened by the heavy stuffiness of the air which we were breathing--
that we were in four front seats of the stalls at the last act
of the drama of the world.

In the immediate foreground, beneath our very eyes, was the
small yard with the half-cleaned motor-car standing in it.
Austin, the chauffeur, had received his final notice at last,
for he was sprawling beside the wheel, with a great black bruise upon
his forehead where it had struck the step or mud-guard in falling.
He still held in his hand the nozzle of the hose with which he had
been washing down his machine.  A couple of small plane trees
stood in the corner of the yard, and underneath them lay several
pathetic little balls of fluffy feathers, with tiny feet uplifted.
The sweep of death's scythe had included everything, great and small,
within its swath.

Over the wall of the yard we looked down upon the winding road,
which led to the station.  A group of the reapers whom we had seen
running from the fields were lying all pell-mell, their bodies crossing
each other, at the bottom of it.  Farther up, the nurse-girl lay with
her head and shoulders propped against the slope of the grassy bank.
She had taken the baby from the perambulator, and it was a motionless
bundle of wraps in her arms.  Close behind her a tiny patch
upon the roadside showed where the little boy was stretched.
Still nearer to us was the dead cab-horse, kneeling between the shafts.
The old driver was hanging over the splash-board like some
grotesque scarecrow, his arms dangling absurdly in front of him.
Through the window we could dimly discern that a young man was
seated inside.  The door was swinging open and his hand was grasping
the handle, as if he had attempted to leap forth at the last instant.
In the middle distance lay the golf links, dotted as they had been
in the morning with the dark figures of the golfers, lying motionless
upon the grass of the course or among the heather which skirted it.
On one particular green there were eight bodies stretched where
a foursome with its caddies had held to their game to the last.
No bird flew in the blue vault of heaven, no man or beast moved
upon the vast countryside which lay before us.  The evening sun
shone its peaceful radiance across it, but there brooded over it
all the stillness and the silence of universal death--a death in
which we were so soon to join.  At the present instant that one frail
sheet of glass, by holding in the extra oxygen which counteracted
the poisoned ether, shut us off from the fate of all our kind.
For a few short hours the knowledge and foresight of one man could
preserve our little oasis of life in the vast desert of death
and save us from participation in the common catastrophe.
Then the gas would run low, we too should lie gasping upon
that cherry-coloured boudoir carpet, and the fate of the human
race and of all earthly life would be complete.  For a long time,
in a mood which was too solemn for speech, we looked out at the tragic
world.

"There is a house on fire," said Challenger at last, pointing to a
column of smoke which rose above the trees.  "There will, I expect,
be many such--possibly whole cities in flames--when we consider
how many folk may have dropped with lights in their hands.
The fact of combustion is in itself enough to show that the proportion
of oxygen in the atmosphere is normal and that it is the ether
which is at fault.  Ah, there you see another blaze on the top
of Crowborough Hill.  It is the golf clubhouse, or I am mistaken.
There is the church clock chiming the hour.  It would interest our
philosophers to know that man-made mechanisms has survived the race
who made it."

"By George!" cried Lord John, rising excitedly from his chair.
"What's that puff of smoke?  It's a train."

We heard the roar of it, and presently it came flying into sight,
going at what seemed to me to be a prodigious speed.
Whence it had come, or how far, we had no means of knowing.
Only by some miracle of luck could it have gone any distance.
But now we were to see the terrific end of its career.
A train of coal trucks stood motionless upon the line.
We held our breath as the express roared along the same track.
The crash was horrible.  Engine and carriages piled themselves
into a hill of splintered wood and twisted iron.  Red spurts
of flame flickered up from the wreckage until it was all ablaze.
For half an hour we sat with hardly a word, stunned by the stupendous
sight.

"Poor, poor people!" cried Mrs. Challenger at last, clinging with
a whimper to her husband's arm.

"My dear, the passengers on that train were no more animate
than the coals into which they crashed or the carbon which they
have now become," said Challenger, stroking her hand soothingly.
"It was a train of the living when it left Victoria, but it was driven
and freighted by the dead long before it reached its fate."

"All over the world the same thing must be going on," said I as a vision
of strange happenings rose before me.  "Think of the ships at sea--
how they will steam on and on, until the furnaces die down or until
they run full tilt upon some beach.  The sailing ships too--
how they will back and fill with their cargoes of dead sailors,
while their timbers rot and their joints leak, till one by one they
sink below the surface.  Perhaps a century hence the Atlantic may still
be dotted with the old drifting derelicts."

"And the folk in the coal-mines," said Summerlee with a dismal chuckle.
"If ever geologists should by any chance live upon earth again
they will have some strange theories of the existence of man in
carboniferous strata."

"I don't profess to know about such things," remarked Lord John,
"but it seems to me the earth will be `To let, empty,' after this.
When once our human crowd is wiped off it, how will it ever get
on again?"

"The world was empty before," Challenger answered gravely.  "Under laws
which in their inception are beyond and above us, it became peopled.
Why may the same process not happen again?"

"My dear Challenger, you can't mean that?"

"I am not in the habit, Professor Summerlee, of saying
things which I do not mean.  The observation is trivial."
Out went the beard and down came the eyelids.

"Well, you lived an obstinate dogmatist, and you mean to die one,"
said Summerlee sourly.

"And you, sir, have lived an unimaginative obstructionist and never
can hope now to emerge from it."

"Your worst critics will never accuse you of lacking imagination,"
Summerlee retorted.

"Upon my word!" said Lord John.  "It would be like you if you used up
our last gasp of oxygen in abusing each other.  What can it matter
whether folk come back or not?  It surely won't be in our time."
"In that remark, sir, you betray your own very pronounced limitations,"
said Challenger severely.  "The true scientific mind is not to be
tied down by its own conditions of time and space.  It builds
itself an observatory erected upon the border line of present,
which separates the infinite past from the infinite future.
From this sure post it makes its sallies even to the beginning
and to the end of all things.  As to death, the scientific mind dies
at its post working in normal and methodic fashion to the end.
It disregards so petty a thing as its own physical dissolution as
completely as it does all other limitations upon the plane of matter.
Am I right, Professor Summerlee?"

Summerlee grumbled an ungracious assent.

"With certain reservations, I agree," said he.

"The ideal scientific mind," continued Challenger--"I put it
in the third person rather than appear to be too self-complacent--
the ideal scientific mind should be capable of thinking out a point
of abstract knowledge in the interval between its owner falling
from a balloon and reaching the earth.  Men of this strong fibre
are needed to form the conquerors of nature and the bodyguard
of truth."

"It strikes me nature's on top this time," said Lord John,
looking out of the window.  "I've read some leadin' articles about you
gentlemen controllin' her, but she's gettin' a bit of her own back."

"It is but a temporary setback," said Challenger with conviction.
"A few million years, what are they in the great cycle of time?
The vegetable world has, as you can see, survived.  Look at the leaves
of that plane tree.  The birds are dead, but the plant flourishes.
From this vegetable life in pond and in marsh will come, in time,
the tiny crawling microscopic slugs which are the pioneers of that great
army of life in which for the instant we five have the extraordinary
duty of serving as rear guard.  Once the lowest form of life has
established itself, the final advent of man is as certain as the
growth of the oak from the acorn.  The old circle will swing round
once more."

"But the poison?"  I asked.  "Will that not nip life in the bud?"

"The poison may be a mere stratum or layer in the ether--a mephitic
Gulf Stream across that mighty ocean in which we float.  Or tolerance
may be established and life accommodate itself to a new condition.
The mere fact that with a comparatively small hyperoxygenation
of our blood we can hold out against it is surely a proof in itself
that no very great change would be needed to enable animal life to
endure it."

The smoking house beyond the trees had burst into flames.
We could see the high tongues of fire shooting up into the air.

"It's pretty awful," muttered Lord John, more impressed than I
had ever seen him.

"Well, after all, what does it matter?"  I remarked.  "The world is dead.
Cremation is surely the best burial."

"It would shorten us up if this house went ablaze."

"I foresaw the danger," said Challenger, "and asked my wife to guard
against it."

"Everything is quite safe, dear.  But my head begins to throb again.
What a dreadful atmosphere!"

"We must change it," said Challenger.  He bent over his cylinder
of oxygen.

"It's nearly empty," said he.  "It has lasted us some three
and a half hours.  It is now close on eight o'cloek. We shall
get through the night comfortably.  I should expect the end
about nine o'clock to-morrow morning.  We shall see one sunrise,
which shall be all our own."

He turned on his second tube and opened for half a minute the fanlight
over the door.  Then as the air became perceptibly better,
but our own symptoms more acute, he closed it once again.

"By the way," said he, "man does not live upon oxygen alone.
It's dinner time and over.  I assure you, gentlemen, that when I invited
you to my home and to what I had hoped would be an interesting reunion,
I had intended that my kitchen should justify itself.  However, we must
do what we can.  I am sure that you will agree with me that it would
be folly to consume our air too rapidly by lighting an oil-stove. I
have some small provision of cold meats, bread, and pickles which,
with a couple of bottles of claret, may serve our turn.  Thank you,
my dear--now as ever you are the queen of managers."

It was indeed wonderful how, with the self-respect and sense of
propriety of the British housekeeper, the lady had within a few minutes
adorned the central table with a snow-white cloth, laid the napkins
upon it, and set forth the simple meal with all the elegance
of civilization, including an electric torch lamp in the centre.
Wonderful also was it to find that our appetites were ravenous.

"It is the measure of our emotion," said Challenger with that air
of condescension with which he brought his scientific mind to the
explanation of humble facts.  "We have gone through a great crisis.
That means molecular disturbance.  That in turn means the need
for repair.  Great sorrow or great joy should bring intense hunger--
not abstinence from food, as our novelists will have it."

"That's why the country folk have great feasts at funerals,"
I hazarded.

"Exactly.  Our young friend has hit upon an excellent illustration.
Let me give you another slice of tongue."

"The same with savages," said Lord John, cutting away at the beef.
"I've seen them buryin' a chief up the Aruwimi River, and they ate
a hippo that must have weighed as much as a tribe.  There are some
of them down New Guinea way that eat the late-lamented himself,
just by way of a last tidy up.  Well, of all the funeral feasts
on this earth, I suppose the one we are takin' is the queerest."

"The strange thing is," said Mrs. Challenger, "that I find it impossible
to feel grief for those who are gone.  There are my father and mother
at Bedford.  I know that they are dead, and yet in this tremendous
universal tragedy I can feel no sharp sorrow for any individuals,
even for them."

"And my old mother in her cottage in Ireland," said I. "I can
see her in my mind's eye, with her shawl and her lace cap,
lying back with closed eyes in the old high-backed chair
near the window, her glasses and her book beside her.
Why should I mourn.  her?  She has passed and I am passing, and I
may be nearer her in some other life than England is to Ireland.
Yet I grieve to think that that dear body is no more."

"As to the body," remarked Challenger, "we do not mourn
over the parings of our nails nor the cut locks of our hair,
though they were once part of ourselves.  Neither does
a one-legged man yearn sentimentally over his missing member.
The physical body has rather been a source of pain and fatigue to us.
It is the constant index of our limitations.  Why then should we
worry about its detachment from our psychical selves?"

"If they can indeed be detached," Summerlee grumbled.  "But, anyhow,
universal death is dreadful."

"As I have already explained," said Challenger, "a universal death
must in its nature be far less terrible than a isolated one."

"Same in a battle," remarked Lord John.  "If you saw a single man
lying on that floor with his chest knocked in and a hole in his face
it would turn you sick.  But I've seen ten thousand on their backs
in the Soudan, and it gave me no such feelin', for when you are makin'
history the life of any man is too small a thing to worry over.
When a thousand million pass over together, same as happened to-day, you
can't pick your own partic'lar out of the crowd."

"I wish it were well over with us," said the lady wistfully.
"Oh, George, I am so frightened."

"You'll be the bravest of us all, little lady, when the time comes.
I've been a blusterous old husband to you, dear, but you'll just bear
in mind that G. E. C. is as he was made and couldn't help himself.
After all, you wouldn't have had anyone else?"

"No one in the whole wide world, dear," said she, and put her arms
round his bull neck.  We three walked to the window and stood
amazed at the sight which met our eyes.

Darkness had fallen and the dead world was shrouded in gloom.
But right across the southern horizon was one long vivid scarlet streak,
waxing and waning in vivid pulses of life, leaping suddenly to a crimson
zenith and then dying down to a glowing line of fire.

"Lewes is ablaze!"

"No, it is Brighton which is burning," said Challenger,
stepping across to join us.  "You can see the curved back of the downs
against the glow.  That fire is miles on the farther side of it.
The whole town must be alight."

There were several red glares at different points, and the pile
of DEBRIS upon the railway line was still smoldering darkly,
but they all seemed mere pin-points of light compared to that
monstrous conflagration throbbing beyond the hills.  What copy
it would have made for the Gazette!  Had ever a journalist such
an opening and so little chance of using it--the scoop of scoops,
and no one to appreciate it?  And then, suddenly, the old instinct
of recording came over me.  If these men of science could be
so true to their life's work to the very end, why should not I,
in my humble way, be as constant?  No human eye might ever rest
upon what I had done.  But the long night had to be passed somehow,
and for me at least, sleep seemed to be out of the question.
My notes would help to pass the weary hours and to occupy my thoughts.
Thus it is that now I have before me the notebook with its
scribbled pages, written confusedly upon my knee in the dim,
waning light of our one electric torch.  Had I the literary touch,
they might have been worthy of the occasion, As it is, they may still
serve to bring to other minds the long-drawn emotions and tremors
of that awful night.



Chapter IV

A DIARY OF THE DYING


How strange the words look scribbled at the top of the empty page
of my book!  How stranger still that it is I, Edward Malone,
who have written them--I who started only some twelve hours ago
from my rooms in Streatham without one thought of the marvels which
the day was to bring forth!  I look back at the chain of incidents,
my interview with McArdle, Challenger's first note of alarm in
the Times, the absurd journey in the train, the pleasant luncheon,
the catastrophe, and now it has come to this--that we linger alone
upon an empty planet, and so sure is our fate that I can regard
these lines, written from mechanical professional habit and never
to be seen by human eyes, as the words of one who is already dead,
so closely does he stand to the shadowed borderland over which all
outside this one little circle of friends have already gone.
I feel how wise and true were the words of Challenger when he said
that the real tragedy would be if we were left behind when all that is
noble and good and beautiful had passed.  But of that there can surely
be no danger.  Already our second tube of oxygen is drawing to an end.
We can count the poor dregs of our lives almost to a minute.

We have just been treated to a lecture, a good quarter of an hour long,
from Challenger, who was so excited that he roared and bellowed
as if he were addressing his old rows of scientific sceptics in
the Queen's Hall.  He had certainly a strange audience to harangue:
his wife perfectly acquiescent and absolutely ignorant of his meaning,
Summerlee seated in the shadow, querulous and critical but interested,
Lord John lounging in a corner somewhat bored by the whole proceeding,
and myself beside the window watching the scene with a kind of
detached attention, as if it were all a dream or something in which I
had no personal interest whatever.  Challenger sat at the centre table
with the electric light illuminating the slide under the microscope
which he had brought from his dressing room.  The small vivid
circle of white light from the mirror left half of his rugged,
bearded face in brilliant radiance and half in deepest shadow.
He had, it seems, been working of late upon the lowest forms of life,
and what excited him at the present moment was that in the microscopic
slide made up the day before he found the amoeba to he still alive.

"You can see it for yourselves," he kept repeating in great excitement.
"Summerlee, will you step across and satisfy yourself upon
the point?  Malone, will you kindly verify what I say?
The little spindle-shaped things in the centre are diatoms and may be
disregarded since they are probably vegetable rather than animal.
But the right-hand side you will see an undoubted amoeba, moving
sluggishly across the field.  The upper screw is the fine adjustment.
Look at it for yourselves."

Summerlee did so and acquiesced.  So did I and perceived a little
creature which looked as if it were made of ground glass flowing
in a sticky way across the lighted circle.  Lord John was prepared
to take him on trust.

"I'm not troublin' my head whether he's alive or dead," said he.
"We don't so much as know each other by sight, so why should I take
it to heart?  I don't suppose he's worryin' himself over the state of
OUR health."

I laughed at this, and Challenger looked in my direction with his
coldest and most supercilious stare.  It was a most petrifying experience.

"The flippancy of the half-educated is more obstructive to science
than the obtuseness of the ignorant," said he.  "If Lord John
Roxton would condescend----"

"My dear George, don't be so peppery," said his wife, with her
hand on the black mane that drooped over the microscope.
"What can it matter whether the amoeba is alive or not?"

"It matters a great deal," said Challenger gruffly.

"Well, let's hear about it," said Lord John with a good-humoured smile.
"We may as well talk about that as anything else.  If you think I've
been too off-hand with the thing, or hurt its feelin's in any way,
I'll apologize."

"For my part," remarked Summerlee in his creaky, argumentative voice,
"I can't see why you should attach such importance to the creature
being alive.  It is in the same atmosphere as ourselves, so naturally
the poison does not act upon it.  If it were outside of this room
it would be dead, like all other animal life."

"Your remarks, my good Summerlee," said Challenger with enormous
condescension (oh, if I could paint that over-bearing, arrogant face
in the vivid circle of reflection from the microscope mirror!)--"your
remarks show that you imperfectly appreciate the situation.
This specimen was mounted yesterday and is hermetically sealed.
None of our oxygen can reach it.  But the ether, of course,
has penetrated to it, as to every other point upon the universe.
Therefore, it has survived the poison.  Hence, we may argue
that every amoeba outside this room, instead of being dead, as you
have erroneously stated, has really survived the catastrophe."

"Well, even now I don't feel inclined to hip-hurrah about it,"
said Lord John.  "What does it matter?"

"It just matters this, that the world is a living instead of a dead one.
If you had the scientific imagination, you would cast your mind
forward from this one fact, and you would see some few millions of
years hence--a mere passing moment in the enormous flux of the ages--
the whole world teeming once more with the animal and human life
which will spring from this tiny root.  You have seen a prairie
fire where the flames have swept every trace of grass or plant
from the surface of the earth and left only a blackened waste.
You would think that it must be forever desert.  Yet the roots
of growth have been left behind, and when you pass the place a few
years hence you can no longer tell where the black scars used to be.
Here in this tiny creature are the roots of growth of the animal world,
and by its inherent development, and evolution, it will surely in time
remove every trace of this incomparable crisis in which we are
now involved."

"Dooced interestin'!" said Lord John, lounging across and looking
through the microscope.  "Funny little chap to hang number one among
the family portraits.  Got a fine big shirt-stud on him!"

"The dark object is his nucleus," said Challenger with the air
of a nurse teaching letters to a baby.

"Well, we needn't feel lonely," said Lord John laughing.
"There's somebody livin' besides us on the earth."

"You seem to take it for granted, Challenger," said Summerlee,
"that the object for which this world was created was that it should
produce and sustain human life."

"Well, sir, and what object do you suggest?" asked Challenger,
bristling at the least hint of contradiction.

"Sometimes I think that it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind
which makes him think that all this stage was erected for him
to strut upon."

"We cannot be dogmatic about it, but at least without what you
have ventured to call monstrous conceit we can surely say that we
are the highest thing in nature."

"The highest of which we have cognizance."

"That, sir, goes without saying."

"Think of all the millions and possibly billions of years that the earth
swung empty through space--or, if not empty, at least without a sign
or thought of the human race.  Think of it, washed by the rain and
scorched by the sun and swept by the wind for those unnumbered ages.
Man only came into being yesterday so far as geological times goes.
Why, then, should it be taken for granted that all this stupendous
preparation was for his benefit?"

"For whose then--or for what?"

Summerlee shrugged his shoulders.

"How can we tell?  For some reason altogether beyond our conception--
and man may have been a mere accident, a by-product evolved in
the process.  It is as if the scum upon the surface of the ocean
imagined that the ocean was created in order to produce and sustain
it or a mouse in a cathedral thought that the building was its own
proper ordained residence."

I have jotted down the very words of their argument, but now it
degenerates into a mere noisy wrangle with much polysyllabic
scientific jargon upon each side.  It is no doubt a privilege
to hear two such brains discuss the highest questions;
but as they are in perpetual disagreement, plain folk like Lord
John and I get little that is positive from the exhibition.
They neutralize each other and we are left as they found us.
Now the hubbub has ceased, and Summerlee is coiled up in his chair,
while Challenger, still fingering the screws of his microscope,
is keeping up a continual low, deep, inarticulate growl like the sea
after a storm.  Lord John comes over to me, and we look out together
into the night.

There is a pale new moon--the last moon that human eyes will ever
rest upon--and the stars are most brilliant.  Even in the clear
plateau air of South America I have never seen them brighter.
Possibly this etheric change has some effect upon light.
The funeral pyre of Brighton is still blazing, and there is a
very distant patch of scarlet in the western sky, which may mean
trouble at Arundel or Chichester, possibly even at Portsmouth.
I sit and muse and make an occasional note.  There is a sweet
melancholy in the air.  Youth and beauty and chivalry and love--
is this to be the end of it all?  The starlit earth looks a dreamland
of gentle peace.  Who would imagine it as the terrible Golgotha
strewn with the bodies of the human race?  Suddenly, I find
myself laughing.

"Halloa, young fellah!" says Lord John, staring at me in surprise.
"We could do with a joke in these hard times.  What was it, then?"

"I was thinking of all the great unsolved questions," I answer,
"the questions that we spent so much labor and thought over.
Think of Anglo-German competition, for example--or the Persian Gulf
that my old chief was so keen about.  Whoever would have guessed,
when we fumed and fretted so, how they were to be eventually solved?"

We fall into silence again.  I fancy that each of us is
thinking of friends that have gone before.  Mrs. Challenger
is sobbing quietly, and her husband is whispering to her.
My mind turns to all the most unlikely people, and I see each
of them lying white and rigid as poor Austin does in the yard.
There is McArdle, for example, I know exactly where he is,
with his face upon his writing desk and his hand on his own telephone,
just as I heard him fall.  Beaumont, the editor, too--I suppose he is
lying upon the blue-and-red Turkey carpet which adorned his sanctum.
And the fellows in the reporters' room--Macdona and Murray and Bond.
They had certainly died hard at work on their job, with note-books
full of vivid impressions and strange happenings in their hands.
I could just imagine how this one would have been packed off
to the doctors, and that other to Westminster, and yet a third to
St. Paul's. What glorious rows of head-lines they must have seen as a
last vision beautiful, never destined to materialize in printer's ink!
I could see Macdona among the doctors--"Hope in Harley Street"--
Mac had always a weakness for alliteration.  "Interview with
Mr. Soley Wilson."  "Famous Specialist says `Never despair!'"
"Our Special Correspondent found the eminent scientist seated upon
the roof, whither he had retreated to avoid the crowd of terrified
patients who had stormed his dwelling.  With a manner which plainly
showed his appreciation of the immense gravity of the occasion,
the celebrated physician refused to admit that every avenue of hope
had been closed."  That's how Mac would start.  Then there was Bond;
he would probably do St. Paul's. He fancied his own literary touch.
My word, what a theme for him!  "Standing in the little gallery under
the dome and looking down upon that packed mass of despairing humanity,
groveling at this last instant before a Power which they had so
persistently ignored, there rose to my ears from the swaying crowd such
a low moan of entreaty and terror, such a shuddering cry for help to
the Unknown, that----" and so forth.

Yes, it would be a great end for a reporter, though, like myself,
he would die with the treasures still unused.  What would Bond
not give, poor chap, to see "J. H. B." at the foot of a column
like that?

But what drivel I am writing!  It is just an attempt to pass
the weary time.  Mrs. Challenger has gone to the inner dressing-room,
and the Professor says that she is asleep.  He is making notes
and consulting books at the central table, as calmly as if years
of placid work lay before him.  He writes with a very noisy quill
pen which seems to be screeching scorn at all who disagree with him.

Summerlee has dropped off in his chair and gives from time to time
a peculiarly exasperating snore.  Lord John lies back with his
hands in his pockets and his eyes closed.  How people can sleep
under such conditions is more than I can imagine.

Three-thirty a.m. I have just wakened with a start.
It was five minutes past eleven when I made my last entry.
I remember winding up my watch and noting the time.  So I have
wasted some five hours of the little span still left to us.
Who would have believed it possible?  But I feel very much fresher,
and ready for my fate--or try to persuade myself that I am.
And yet, the fitter a man is, and the higher his tide of life,
the more must he shrink from death.  How wise and how merciful
is that provision of nature by which his earthly anchor is usually
loosened by many little imperceptible tugs, until his consciousness
has drifted out of its untenable earthly harbor into the great
sea beyond!

Mrs. Challenger is still in the dressing room.  Challenger has fallen
asleep in his chair.  What a picture!  His enormous frame leans back,
his huge, hairy hands are clasped across his waistcoat, and his head is
so tilted that I can see nothing above his collar save a tangled bristle
of luxuriant beard.  He shakes with the vibration of his own snoring.
Summerlee adds his occasional high tenor to Challenger's sonorous bass.
Lord John is sleeping also, his long body doubled up sideways
in a basket-chair. The first cold light of dawn is just stealing
into the room, and everything is grey and mournful.

I look out at the sunrise--that fateful sunrise which will shine upon
an unpeopled world.  The human race is gone, extinguished in a day,
but the planets swing round and the tides rise or fall, and the
wind whispers, and all nature goes her way, down, as it would seem,
to the very amoeba, with never a sign that he who styled himself
the lord of creation had ever blessed or cursed the universe with
his presence.  Down in the yard lies Austin with sprawling limbs,
his face glimmering white in the dawn, and the hose nozzle
still projecting from his dead hand.  The whole of human kind
is typified in that one half-ludicrous and half-pathetic figure,
lying so helpless beside the machine which it used to control.


Here end the notes which I made at the time.  Henceforward events
were too swift and too poignant to allow me to write, but they are
too clearly outlined in my memory that any detail could escape me.

Some chokiness in my throat made me look at the oxygen cylinders,
and I was startled at what I saw.  The sands of our lives
were running very low.  At some period in the night Challenger
had switched the tube from the third to the fourth cylinder.
Now it was clear that this also was nearly exhausted.
That horrible feeling of constriction was closing in upon me.
I ran across and, unscrewing the nozzle, I changed it to our last supply.
Even as I did so my conscience pricked me, for I felt that perhaps
if I had held my hand all of them might have passed in their sleep.
The thought was banished, however, by the voice of the lady from the inner
room crying:--

"George, George, I am stifling!"

"It is all right, Mrs. Challenger," I answered as the others started
to their feet.  "I have just turned on a fresh supply."

Even at such a moment I could not help smiling at Challenger,
who with a great hairy fist in each eye was like a huge,
bearded baby, new wakened out of sleep.  Summerlee was shivering
like a man with the ague, human fears, as he realized his position,
rising for an instant above the stoicism of the man of science.
Lord John, however, was as cool and alert as if he had just been roused
on a hunting morning.

"Fifthly and lastly," said he, glancing at the tube.  "Say, young fellah,
don't tell me you've been writin' up your impressions in that paper
on your knee."

"Just a few notes to pass the time."

"Well, I don't believe anyone but an Irishman would have done that.
I expect you'll have to wait till little brother amoeba gets
grown up before you'll find a reader.  He don't seem to take much
stock of things just at present.  Well, Herr Professor, what are
the prospects?"

Challenger was looking out at the great drifts of morning mist
which lay over the landscape.  Here and there the wooded hills
rose like conical islands out of this woolly sea.

"It might be a winding sheet," said Mrs. Challenger, who had entered
in her dressing-gown. "There's that song of yours, George, `Ring out
the old, ring in the new.'  It was prophetic.  But you are shivering,
my poor dear friends.  I have been warm under a coverlet all night,
and you cold in your chairs.  But I'll soon set you right."

The brave little creature hurried away, and presently we heard
the sizzling of a kettle.  She was back soon with five steaming
cups of cocoa upon a tray.

"Drink these," said she.  "You will feel so much better."

And we did.  Summerlee asked if he might light his pipe, and we
all had cigarettes.  It steadied our nerves, I think, but it was
a mistake, for it made a dreadful atmosphere in that stuffy room.
Challenger had to open the ventilator.

"How long, Challenger?" asked Lord John.

"Possibly three hours," he answered with a shrug.

"I used to be frightened," said his wife.  "But the nearer I get to it,
the easier it seems.  Don't you think we ought to pray, George?"

"You will pray, dear, if you wish," the big man answered, very gently.
"We all have our own ways of praying.  Mine is a complete
acquiescence in whatever fate may send me--a cheerful acquiescence.
The highest religion and the highest science seem to unite
on that."

"I cannot truthfully describe my mental attitude as acquiescence
and far less cheerful acquiescence," grumbled Summerlee over his pipe.
"I submit because I have to.  I confess that I should have liked
another year of life to finish my classification of the chalk fossils."

"Your unfinished work is a small thing," said Challenger pompously,
"when weighed against the fact that my own MAGNUM OPUS,
`The Ladder of Life,' is still in the first stages.  My brain,
my reading, my experience--in fact, my whole unique equipment--
were to be condensed into that epoch-making volume.  And yet, as I say,
I acquiesce."

"I expect we've all left some loose ends stickin' out," said Lord John.
"What are yours, young fellah?"

"I was working at a book of verses," I answered.

"Well, the world has escaped that, anyhow," said Lord John.
"There's always compensation somewhere if you grope around."

"What about you?"  I asked.

"Well, it just so happens that I was tidied up and ready.
I'd promised Merivale to go to Tibet for a snow leopard in the spring.
But it's hard on you, Mrs. Challenger, when you have just built up this
pretty home."

"Where George is, there is my home.  But, oh, what would I not give for one
last walk together in the fresh morning air upon those beautiful downs!"

Our hearts re-echoed her words.  The sun had burst through the gauzy mists
which veiled it, and the whole broad Weald was washed in golden light.
Sitting in our dark and poisonous atmosphere that glorious,
clean, wind-swept countryside seemed a very dream of beauty.
Mrs. Challenger held her hand stretched out to it in her longing.
We drew up chairs and sat in a semicircle in the window.
The atmosphere was already very close.  It seemed to me that the
shadows of death were drawing in upon us--the last of our race.
It was like an invisible curtain closing down upon every side.

"That cylinder is not lastin' too well," said Lord John with a long
gasp for breath.

"The amount contained is variable," said Challenger, "depending upon
the pressure and care with which it has been bottled.  I am inclined
to agree with you, Roxton, that this one is defective."

"So we are to be cheated out of the last hour of our lives,"
Summerlee remarked bitterly.  "An excellent final illustration
of the sordid age in which we have lived.  Well, Challenger,
now is your time if you wish to study the subjective phenomena
of physical dissolution."

"Sit on the stool at my knee and give me your hand,"
said Challenger to his wife.  "I think, my friends, that a further
delay in this insufferable atmosphere is hardly advisable.
You would not desire it, dear, would you?"

His wife gave a little groan and sank her face against his leg.

"I've seen the folk bathin' in the Serpentine in winter,"
said Lord John.  "When the rest are in, you see one or two shiverin'
on the bank, envyin' the others that have taken the plunge.
It's the last that have the worst of it.  I'm all for a header and have
done with it."

"You would open the window and face the ether?"

"Better be poisoned than stifled."

Summerlee nodded his reluctant acquiescence and held out his thin
hand to Challenger.

"We've had our quarrels in our time, but that's all over," said he.
"We were good friends and had a respect for each other under
the surface.  Good-by!"

"Good-by, young fellah!" said Lord John.  "The window's plastered up.
You can't open it."

Challenger stooped and raised his wife, pressing her to his breast,
while she threw her arms round his neck.

"Give me that field-glass, Malone," said he gravely.

I handed it to him.

"Into the hands of the Power that made us we render ourselves again!"
he shouted in his voice of thunder, and at the words he hurled
the field-glass through the window.

Full in our flushed faces, before the last tinkle of falling
fragments had died away, there came the wholesome breath of the wind,
blowing strong and sweet.

I don't know how long we sat in amazed silence.  Then as in a dream,
I heard Challenger's voice once more.

"We are back in normal conditions," he cried.  "The world has
cleared the poison belt, but we alone of all mankind are saved."



Chapter V

THE DEAD WORLD


I remember that we all sat gasping in our chairs, with that sweet,
wet south-western breeze, fresh from the sea, flapping the muslin
curtains and cooling our flushed faces.  I wonder how long we sat!
None of us afterwards could agree at all on that point.
We were bewildered, stunned, semi-conscious. We had all braced our
courage for death, but this fearful and sudden new fact--that we must
continue to live after we had survived the race to which we belonged--
struck us with the shock of a physical blow and left us prostrate.
Then gradually the suspended mechanism began to move once more;
the shuttles of memory worked; ideas weaved themselves together
in our minds.  We saw, with vivid, merciless clearness,
the relations between the past, the present, and the future--
the lives that we had led and the lives which we would have to live.
Our eyes turned in silent horror upon those of our companions
and found the same answering look in theirs.  Instead of the joy
which men might have been expected to feel who had so narrowly
escaped an imminent death, a terrible wave of darkest depression
submerged us.  Everything on earth that we loved had been washed
away into the great, infinite, unknown ocean, and here were we
marooned upon this desert island of a world, without companions,
hopes, or aspirations.  A few years' skulking like jackals among
the graves of the human race and then our belated and lonely end
would come.

"It's dreadful, George, dreadful!" the lady cried in an agony of sobs.
"If we had only passed with the others!  Oh, why did you save us?
I feel as if it is we that are dead and everyone else alive."

Challenger's great eyebrows were drawn down in concentrated thought,
while his huge, hairy paw closed upon the outstretched hand of his wife.
I had observed that she always held out her arms to him in trouble
as a child would to its mother.

"Without being a fatalist to the point of nonresistance," said he,
"I have always found that the highest wisdom lies in an acquiescence
with the actual."  He spoke slowly, and there was a vibration
of feeling in his sonorous voice.

"I do NOT acquiesce," said Summerlee firmly.

"I don't see that it matters a row of pins whether you acquiesce
or whether you don't," remarked Lord John.  "You've got to take it,
whether you take it fightin' or take it lyin' down, so what's the odds
whether you acquiesce or not?

I can't remember that anyone asked our permission before
the thing began, and nobody's likely to ask it now.
So what difference can it make what we may think of it?"

"It is just all the difference between happiness and misery,"
said Challenger with an abstracted face, still patting his wife's hand.
"You can swim with the tide and have peace in mind and soul,
or you can thrust against it and be bruised and weary.
This business is beyond us, so let us accept it as it stands and say
no more."

"But what in the world are we to do with our lives?"  I asked,
appealing in desperation to the blue, empty heaven.

"What am I to do, for example?  There are no newspapers, so there's
an end of my vocation."

"And there's nothin' left to shoot, and no more soldierin',
so there's an end of mine," said Lord John.

"And there are no students, so there's an end of mine,"
cried Summerlee.

"But I have my husband and my house, so I can thank heaven that there
is no end of mine," said the lady.

"Nor is there an end of mine," remarked Challenger, "for science
is not dead, and this catastrophe in itself will offer us many
most absorbing problems for investigation."

He had now flung open the windows and we were gazing out upon
the silent and motionless landscape.

"Let me consider," he continued.  "It was about three, or a
little after, yesterday afternoon that the world finally entered
the poison belt to the extent of being completely submerged.
It is now nine o'clock. The question is, at what hour did we pass
out from it?"

"The air was very bad at daybreak," said I.

"Later than that," said Mrs. Challenger.  "As late as eight
o'clock I distinctly felt the same choking at my throat which came
at the outset."

"Then we shall say that it passed just after eight o'clock. For
seventeen hours the world has been soaked in the poisonous ether.
For that length of time the Great Gardener has sterilized the human
mold which had grown over the surface of His fruit.  Is it possible
that the work is incompletely done--that others may have survived
besides ourselves?"

"That's what I was wonderin'" said Lord John.  "Why should we
be the only pebbles on the beach?"

"It is absurd to suppose that anyone besides ourselves can
possibly have survived," said Summerlee with conviction.
"Consider that the poison was so virulent that even a man who is
as strong as an ox and has not a nerve in his body, like Malone here,
could hardly get up the stairs before he fell unconscious.
Is it likely that anyone could stand seventeen minutes of it,
far less hours?"

"Unless someone saw it coming and made preparation, same as old
friend Challenger did."

"That, I think, is hardly probable," said Challenger, projecting his
beard and sinking his eyelids.  "The combination of observation,
inference, and anticipatory imagination which enabled me to foresee
the danger is what one can hardly expect twice in the same generation."

"Then your conclusion is that everyone is certainly dead?"

"There can be little doubt of that.  We have to remember, however,
that the poison worked from below upwards and would possibly be less
virulent in the higher strata of the atmosphere.  It is strange,
indeed, that it should be so; but it presents one of those features
which will afford us in the future a fascinating field for study.
One could imagine, therefore, that if one had to search for survivors
one would turn one's eyes with best hopes of success to some Tibetan
village or some Alpine farm, many thousands of feet above the sea level."

"Well, considerin' that there are no railroads and no steamers you
might as well talk about survivors in the moon," said Lord John.
"But what I'm askin' myself is whether it's really over or whether it's
only half-time."

Summerlee craned his neck to look round the horizon.  "It seems clear
and fine," said he in a very dubious voice; "but so it did yesterday.
I am by no means assured that it is all over."

Challenger shrugged his shoulders.

"We must come back once more to our fatalism," said he.  "If the world
has undergone this experience before, which is not outside the range
of possibility; it was certainly a very long time ago.  Therefore, we may
reasonably hope that it will be very long before it occurs again.
"

"That's all very well," said Lord John, "but if you get an earthquake
shock you are mighty likely to have a second one right on the top of it.
I think we'd be wise to stretch our legs and have a breath of air
while we have the chance.  Since our oxygen is exhausted we may
just as well be caught outside as in."

It was strange the absolute lethargy which had come upon us as a
reaction after our tremendous emotions of the last twenty-four hours.
It was both mental and physical, a deep-lying feeling that nothing
mattered and that everything was a weariness and a profitless exertion.
Even Challenger had succumbed to it, and sat in his chair,
with his great head leaning upon his hands and his thoughts far away,
until Lord John and I, catching him by each arm, fairly lifted him
on to his feet, receiving only the glare and growl of an angry mastiff
for our trouble.  However, once we had got out of our narrow haven
of refuge into the wider atmosphere of everyday life, our normal energy
came gradually back to us once more.

But what were we to begin to do in that graveyard of a world?
Could ever men have been faced with such a question since the dawn
of time?  It is true that our own physical needs, and even our luxuries,
were assured for the future.  All the stores of food, all the vintages
of wine, all the treasures of art were ours for the taking.
But what were we to DO?  Some few tasks appealed to us at once,
since they lay ready to our hands.  We descended into the kitchen
and laid the two domestics upon their respective beds.
They seemed to have died without suffering, one in the chair
by the fire, the other upon the scullery floor.  Then we carried
in poor Austin from the yard.  His muscles were set as hard as a
board in the most exaggerated rigor mortis, while the contraction
of the fibres had drawn his mouth into a hard sardonic grin.
This symptom was prevalent among all who had died from the poison.
Wherever we went we were confronted by those grinning faces, which seemed
to mock at our dreadful position, smiling silently and grimly at the
ill-fated survivors of their race.

"Look here," said Lord John, who had paced restlessly about the dining-room
whilst we partook of some food, "I don't know how you fellows
feel about it, but for my part, I simply CAN'T sit here and do nothin'."

"Perhaps," Challenger answered, "you would have the kindness
to suggest what you think we ought to do."

"Get a move on us and see all that has happened."

"That is what I should myself propose."

"But not in this little country village.  We can see from the window
all that this place can teach us."

"Where should we go, then?"

"To London!"

"That's all very well," grumbled Summerlee.  "You may be equal
to a forty-mile walk, but I'm not so sure about Challenger,
with his stumpy legs, and I am perfectly sure about myself."
Challenger was very much annoyed.

"If you could see your way, sir, to confining your remarks to your
own physical peculiarities, you would find that you had an ample
field for comment," he cried.

"I had no intention to offend you, my dear Challenger," cried our
tactless friend, "You can't be held responsible for your own physique.
If nature has given you a short, heavy body you cannot possibly help
having stumpy legs."

Challenger was too furious to answer.  He could only growl and blink
and bristle.  Lord John hastened to intervene before the dispute
became more violent.

"You talk of walking.  Why should we walk?" said he.

"Do you suggest taking a train?" asked Challenger, still simmering.

"What's the matter with the motor-car? Why should we not go in that?"

"I am not an expert," said Challenger, pulling at his beard reflectively.
"At the same time, you are right in supposing that the human intellect
in its higher manifestations should be sufficiently flexible to turn
itself to anything.  Your idea is an excellent one, Lord John.
I myself will drive you all to London."

"You will do nothing of the kind," said Summerlee with decision.

"No, indeed, George!" cried his wife.  "You only tried once,
and you remember how you crashed through the gate of the garage."

"It was a momentary want of concentration," said Challenger complacently.
"You can consider the matter settled.  I will certainly drive you
all to London."

The situation was relieved by Lord John.

"What's the car?" he asked.

"A twenty-horsepower Humber."

"Why, I've driven one for years," said he.  "By George!" he added.
"I never thought I'd live to take the whole human race in one load.
There's just room for five, as I remember it.  Get your things on,
and I'll be ready at the door by ten o'clock."

Sure enough, at the hour named, the car came purring and crackling
from the yard with Lord John at the wheel.  I took my seat beside him,
while the lady, a useful little buffer state, was squeezed in between
the two men of wrath at the back.  Then Lord John released his brakes,
slid his lever rapidly from first to third, and we sped off upon
the strangest drive that ever human beings have taken since man
first came upon the earth.

You are to picture the loveliness of nature upon that August day,
the freshness of the morning air, the golden glare of the summer sunshine,
the cloudless sky, the luxuriant green of the Sussex woods,
and the deep purple of heather-clad downs.  As you looked round
upon the many-coloured beauty of the scene all thought of a vast
catastrophe would have passed from your mind had it not been
for one sinister sign--the solemn, all-embracing silence.
There is a gentle hum of life which pervades a closely-settled country,
so deep and constant that one ceases to observe it, as the dweller
by the sea loses all sense of the constant murmur of the waves.
The twitter of birds, the buzz of insects, the far-off echo
of voices, the lowing of cattle, the distant barking of dogs,
roar of trains, and rattle of carts--all these form one low,
unremitting note, striking unheeded upon the ear.  We missed
it now.  This deadly silence was appalling.  So solemn was it,
so impressive, that the buzz and rattle of our motor-car seemed
an unwarrantable intrusion, an indecent disregard of this reverent
stillness which lay like a pall over and round the ruins of humanity.
It was this grim hush, and the tall clouds of smoke which rose here
and there over the country-side from smoldering buildings, which cast
a chill into our hearts as we gazed round at the glorious panorama of
the Weald.

And then there were the dead!  At first those endless groups
of drawn and grinning faces filled us with a shuddering horror.
So vivid and mordant was the impression that I can live over again
that slow descent of the station hill, the passing by the nurse-girl
with the two babes, the sight of the old horse on his knees between
the shafts, the cabman twisted across his seat, and the young man inside
with his hand upon the open door in the very act of springing out.
Lower down were six reapers all in a litter, their limbs crossing,
their dead, unwinking eyes gazing upwards at the glare of heaven.
These things I see as in a photograph.  But soon, by the merciful
provision of nature, the over-excited nerve ceased to respond.
The very vastness of the horror took away from its personal appeal.
Individuals merged into groups, groups into crowds, crowds into
a universal phenomenon which one soon accepted as the inevitable
detail of every scene.  Only here and there, where some particularly
brutal or grotesque incident caught the attention, did the mind
come back with a sudden shock to the personal and human meaning
of it all.

Above all, there was the fate of the children.  That, I remember,
filled us with the strongest sense of intolerable injustice.
We could have wept--Mrs. Challenger did weep--when we passed
a great council school and saw the long trail of tiny figures
scattered down the road which led from it.  They had been dismissed
by their terrified teachers and were speeding for their homes
when the poison caught them in its net.  Great numbers of people
were at the open windows of the houses.  In Tunbridge Wells
there was hardly one which had not its staring, smiling face.
At the last instant the need of air, that very craving for oxygen which we
alone had been able to satisfy, had sent them flying to the window.
The sidewalks too were littered with men and women, hatless and bonnetless,
who had rushed out of the houses.  Many of them had fallen in
the roadway.  It was a lucky thing that in Lord John we had found
an expert driver, for it was no easy matter to pick one's way.
Passing through the villages or towns we could only go at a walking pace,
and once, I remember, opposite the school at Tonbridge, we had
to halt some time while we carried aside the bodies which blocked
our path.


A few small, definite pictures stand out in my memory from amid
that long panorama of death upon the Sussex and Kentish high roads.
One was that of a great, glittering motor-car standing outside
the inn at the village of Southborough.  It bore, as I should guess,
some pleasure party upon their return from Brighton or from Eastbourne.
There were three gaily dressed women, all young and beautiful,
one of them with a Peking spaniel upon her lap.  With them were
a rakish-looking elderly man and a young aristocrat, his eyeglass
still in his eye, his cigarette burned down to the stub between
the fingers of his begloved hand.  Death must have come on them
in an instant and fixed them as they sat.  Save that the elderly man
had at the last moment torn out his collar in an effort to breathe,
they might all have been asleep.  On one side of the car a waiter
with some broken glasses beside a tray was huddled near the step.
On the other, two very ragged tramps, a man and a woman, lay where they
had fallen, the man with his long, thin arm still outstretched,
even as he had asked for alms in his lifetime.  One instant of time
had put aristocrat, waiter, tramp, and dog upon one common footing of
inert and dissolving protoplasm.

I remember another singular picture, some miles on the London side
of Sevenoaks.  There is a large convent upon the left, with a long,
green slope in front of it.  Upon this slope were assembled a great
number of school children, all kneeling at prayer.  In front of them
was a fringe of nuns, and higher up the slope, facing towards them,
a single figure whom we took to be the Mother Superior.
Unlike the pleasure-seekers in the motor-car, these people seemed to
have had warning of their danger and to have died beautifully together,
the teachers and the taught, assembled for their last common lesson.

My mind is still stunned by that terrific experience, and I grope
vainly for means of expression by which I can reproduce the emotions
which we felt.  Perhaps it is best and wisest not to try,
but merely to indicate the facts.  Even Summerlee and Challenger
were crushed, and we heard nothing of our companions behind us save
an occasional whimper from the lady.  As to Lord John, he was too
intent upon his wheel and the difficult task of threading his way
along such roads to have time or inclination for conversation.
One phrase he used with such wearisome iteration that it stuck in my
memory and at last almost made me laugh as a comment upon the day
of doom.

"Pretty doin's! What!"

That was his ejaculation as each fresh tremendous combination of death
and disaster displayed itself before us.  "Pretty doin's! What!"
he cried, as we descended the station hill at Rotherfield,
and it was still "Pretty doin's! What!" as we picked our way through
a wilderness of death in the High Street of Lewisham and the Old
Kent Road.

It was here that we received a sudden and amazing shock.
Out of the window of a humble corner house there appeared a fluttering
handkerchief waving at the end of a long, thin human arm.
Never had the sight of unexpected death caused our hearts to stop
and then throb so wildly as did this amazing indication of life.
Lord John ran the motor to the curb, and in an instant we had
rushed through the open door of the house and up the staircase
to the second-floor front room from which the signal proceeded.

A very old lady sat in a chair by the open window, and close
to her, laid across a second chair, was a cylinder of oxygen,
smaller but of the same shape as those which had saved our own lives.
She turned her thin, drawn, bespectacled face toward us as we crowded
in at the doorway.

"I feared that I was abandoned here forever," said she, "for I am
an invalid and cannot stir."

"Well, madam," Challenger answered, "it is a lucky chance that we
happened to pass."

"I have one all-important question to ask you," said she.
"Gentlemen, I beg that you will be frank with me.  What effect will
these events have upon London and North-Western Railway shares?"

We should have laughed had it not been for the tragic eagerness
with which she listened for our answer.  Mrs. Burston,
for that was her name, was an aged widow, whose whole income
depended upon a small holding of this stock.  Her life had been
regulated by the rise and fall of the dividend, and she could form
no conception of existence save as it was affected by the quotation
of her shares.  In vain we pointed out to her that all the money
in the world was hers for the taking and was useless when taken.
Her old mind would not adapt itself to the new idea, and she wept
loudly over her vanished stock.  "It was all I had," she wailed.
"If that is gone I may as well go too."

Amid her lamentations we found out how this frail old plant had
lived where the whole great forest had fallen.  She was a confirmed
invalid and an asthmatic.  Oxygen had been prescribed for her malady,
and a tube was in her room at the moment of the crisis.
She had naturally inhaled some as had been her habit when there
was a difficulty with her breathing.  It had given her relief,
and by doling out her supply she had managed to survive the night.
Finally she had fallen asleep and been awakened by the buzz of our
motor-car. As it was impossible to take her on with us, we saw
that she had all necessaries of life and promised to communicate
with her in a couple of days at the latest.  So we left her,
still weeping bitterly over her vanished stock.

As we approached the Thames the block in the streets became thicker
and the obstacles more bewildering.  It was with difficulty that we
made our way across London Bridge.  The approaches to it upon
the Middlesex side were choked from end to end with frozen traffic
which made all further advance in that direction impossible.
A ship was blazing brightly alongside one of the wharves near
the bridge, and the air was full of drifting smuts and of a heavy
acrid smell of burning.  There was a cloud of dense smoke somewhere
near the Houses of Parliament, but it was impossible from where we
were to see what was on fire.

"I don't know how it strikes you," Lord John remarked as he brought
his engine to a standstill, "but it seems to me the country is more
cheerful than the town.  Dead London is gettin' on my nerves.
I'm for a cast round and then gettin' back to Rotherfield."

"I confess that I do not see what we can hope for here,"
said Professor Summerlee.

"At the same time," said Challenger, his great voice booming
strangely amid the silence, "it is difficult for us to conceive
that out of seven millions of people there is only this one old
woman who by some peculiarity of constitution or some accident
of occupation has managed to survive this catastrophe."

"If there should be others, how can we hope to find them, George?"
asked the lady.  "And yet I agree with you that we cannot go back
until we have tried."

Getting out of the car and leaving it by the curb, we walked
with some difficulty along the crowded pavement of King William
Street and entered the open door of a large insurance office.
It was a corner house, and we chose it as commanding a view
in every direction.  Ascending the stair, we passed through
what I suppose to have been the board-room, for eight elderly
men were seated round a long table in the centre of it.
The high window was open and we all stepped out upon the balcony.
From it we could see the crowded city streets radiating in every direction,
while below us the road was black from side to side with the tops
of the motionless taxis.  All, or nearly all, had their heads
pointed outwards, showing how the terrified men of the city had
at the last moment made a vain endeavor to rejoin their families
in the suburbs or the country.  Here and there amid the humbler cabs
towered the great brass-spangled motor-car of some wealthy magnate,
wedged hopelessly among the dammed stream of arrested traffic.
Just beneath us there was such a one of great size and luxurious
appearance, with its owner, a fat old man, leaning out, half his gross
body through the window, and his podgy hand, gleaming with diamonds,
outstretched as he urged his chauffeur to make a last effort to break
through the press.

A dozen motor-buses towered up like islands in this flood,
the passengers who crowded the roofs lying all huddled together
and across eash others' laps like a child's toys in a nursery.
On a broad lamp pedestal in the centre of the roadway, a burly
policeman was standing, leaning his back against the post in so natural
an attitude that it was hard to realize that he was not alive,
while at his feet there lay a ragged newsboy with his bundle of papers
on the ground beside him.  A paper-cart had got blocked in the crowd,
and we could read in large letters, black upon yellow, "Scene at Lord's.
County Match Interrupted."  This must have been the earliest edition,
for there were other placards bearing the legend, "Is It the End?
Great Scientist's Warning."  And another, "Is Challenger Justified?
Ominous Rumours."

Challenger pointed the latter placard out to his wife, as it
thrust itself like a banner above the throng.  I could see him
throw out his chest and stroke his beard as he looked at it.
It pleased and flattered that complex mind to think that London had
died with his name and his words still present in their thoughts.
His feelings were so evident that they aroused the sardonic comment of
his colleague.

"In the limelight to the last, Challenger," he remarked.

"So it would appear," he answered complacently.  "Well," he added
as he looked down the long vista of the radiating streets,
all silent and all choked up with death, "I really see no purpose
to be served by our staying any longer in London.  I suggest that we
return at once to Rotherfield and then take counsel as to how we
shall most profitably employ the years which lie before us."

Only one other picture shall I give of the scenes which we
carried back in our memories from the dead city.  It is a glimpse
which we had of the interior of the old church of St. Mary's,
which is at the very point where our car was awaiting us.
Picking our way among the prostrate figures upon the steps,
we pushed open the swing door and entered.  It was a wonderful sight.
The church was crammed from end to end with kneeling figures in every
posture of supplication and abasement.  At the last dreadful moment,
brought suddenly face to face with the realities of life,
those terrific realities which hang over us even while we follow
the shadows, the terrified people had rushed into those old city
churches which for generations had hardly ever held a congregation.
There they huddled as close as they could kneel, many of them
in their agitation still wearing their hats, while above them in
the pulpit a young man in lay dress had apparently been addressing
them when he and they had been overwhelmed by the same fate.
He lay now, like Punch in his booth, with his head and two limp arms
hanging over the ledge of the pulpit.  It was a nightmare, the grey,
dusty church, the rows of agonized figures, the dimness and silence
of it all.  We moved about with hushed whispers, walking upon our
tip-toes.

And then suddenly I had an idea.  At one corner of the church,
near the door, stood the ancient font, and behind it a deep recess in
which there hung the ropes for the bell-ringers. Why should we not send
a message out over London which would attract to us anyone who might
still be alive?  I ran across, and pulling at the list-covered rope,
I was surprised to find how difficult it was to swing the bell.
Lord John had followed me.

"By George, young fellah!" said he, pulling off his coat.
"You've hit on a dooced good notion.  Give me a grip and we'll soon
have a move on it."


But, even then, so heavy was the bell that it was not until
Challenger and Summerlee had added their weight to ours that we
heard the roaring and clanging above our heads which told us
that the great clapper was ringing out its music.  Far over dead
London resounded our message of comradeship and hope to any
fellow-man surviving.  It cheered our own hearts, that strong,
metallic call, and we turned the more earnestly to our work,
dragged two feet off the earth with each upward jerk of the rope,
but all straining together on the downward heave, Challenger the lowest
of all, bending all his great strength to the task and flopping up
and down like a monstrous bull-frog, croaking with every pull.
It was at that moment that an artist might have taken a picture
of the four adventurers, the comrades of many strange perils in
the past, whom fate had now chosen for so supreme an experience.
For half an hour we worked, the sweat dropping from our faces,
our arms and backs aching with the exertion.  Then we went out into
the portico of the church and looked eagerly up and down the silent,
crowded streets.  Not a sound, not a motion, in answer to
our summons.

"It's no use.  No one is left," I cried.

"We can do nothing more," said Mrs. Challenger.  "For God's sake,
George, let us get back to Rotherfield.  Another hour of this dreadful,
silent city would drive me mad."

We got into the car without another word.  Lord John backed her round
and turned her to the south.  To us the chapter seemed closed.
Little did we foresee the strange new chapter which was to open.



Chapter VI

THE GREAT AWAKENING

And now I come to the end of this extraordinary incident,
so overshadowing in its importance, not only in our own small,
individual lives, but in the general history of the human race.
As I said when I began my narrative, when that history comes to
be written, this occurrence will surely stand out among all other
events like a mountain towering among its foothills.  Our generation
has been reserved for a very special fate since it has been chosen
to experience so wonderful a thing.  How long its effect may last--
how long mankind may preserve the humility and reverence which this
great shock has taught it--can only be shown by the future.
I think it is safe to say that things can never be quite the same again.
Never can one realize how powerless and ignorant one is, and how one
is upheld by an unseen hand, until for an instant that hand has
seemed to close and to crush.  Death has been imminent upon us.
We know that at any moment it may be again.  That grim presence shadows
our lives, but who can deny that in that shadow the sense of duty,
the feeling of sobriety and responsibility, the appreciation
of the gravity and of the objects of life, the earnest desire
to develop and improve, have grown and become real with us
to a degree that has leavened our whole society from end to end?
It is something beyond sects and beyond dogmas.  It is rather
an alteration of perspective, a shifting of our sense of proportion,
a vivid realization that we are insignificant and evanescent creatures,
existing on sufferance and at the mercy of the first chill wind
from the unknown.  But if the world has grown graver with this
knowledge it is not, I think, a sadder place in consequence.
Surely we are agreed that the more sober and restrained pleasures
of the present are deeper as well as wiser than the noisy,
foolish hustle which passed so often for enjoyment in the days of old--
days so recent and yet already so inconceivable.  Those empty
lives which were wasted in aimless visiting and being visited,
in the worry of great and unnecessary households, in the arranging
and eating of elaborate and tedious meals, have now found rest
and health in the reading, the music, the gentle family communion
which comes from a simpler and saner division of their time.
With greater health and greater pleasure they are richer than before,
even after they have paid those increased contributions to the
common fund which have so raised the standard of life in these
islands.

There is some clash of opinion as to the exact hour of
the great awakening.  It is generally agreed that, apart from
the difference of clocks, there may have been local causes
which influenced the action of the poison.  Certainly, in each
separate district the resurrection was practically simultaneous.
There are numerous witnesses that Big Ben pointed to ten minutes past
six at the moment.  The Astronomer Royal has fixed the Greenwich
time at twelve past six.  On the other hand, Laird Johnson, a very
capable East Anglia observer, has recorded six-twenty as the hour.
In the Hebrides it was as late as seven.  In our own case there
can be no doubt whatever, for I was seated in Challenger's study
with his carefully tested chronometer in front of me at the moment.
The hour was a quarter-past six.


An enormous depression was weighing upon my spirits.  The cumulative
effect of all the dreadful sights which we had seen upon our journey
was heavy upon my soul.  With my abounding animal health and great
physical energy any kind of mental clouding was a rare event.
I had the Irish faculty of seeing some gleam of humor in
every darkness.  But now the obscurity was appalling and unrelieved.
The others were downstairs making their plans for the future.
I sat by the open window, my chin resting upon my hand and my mind
absorbed in the misery of our situation.  Could we continue to live?
That was the question which I had begun to ask myself.
Was it possible to exist upon a dead world?  Just as in physics
the greater body draws to itself the lesser, would we not feel
an overpowering attraction from that vast body of humanity
which had passed into the unknown?  How would the end come?
Would it be from a return of the poison?  Or would the earth
be uninhabitable from the mephitic products of universal decay?
Or, finally, might our awful situation prey upon and unbalance our minds?
A group of insane folk upon a dead world!  My mind was brooding upon
this last dreadful idea when some slight noise caused me to look
down upon the road beneath me.  The old cab horse was coming up
the hill!

I was conscious at the same instant of the twittering of birds,
of someone coughing in the yard below, and of a background
of movement in the landscape.  And yet I remember that it was
that absurd, emaciated, superannuated cab-horse which held my gaze.
Slowly and wheezily it was climbing the slope.  Then my eye traveled
to the driver sitting hunched up upon the box and finally to the young
man who was leaning out of the window in some excitement and shouting
a direction.  They were all indubitably, aggressively alive!

Everybody was alive once more!  Had it all been a delusion?
Was it conceivable that this whole poison belt incident had been
an elaborate dream?  For an instant my startled brain was really
ready to believe it.  Then I looked down, and there was the rising
blister on my hand where it was frayed by the rope of the city bell.
It had really been so, then.  And yet here was the world resuscitated--
here was life come back in an instant full tide to the planet.
Now, as my eyes wandered all over the great landscape, I saw it
in every direction--and moving, to my amazement, in the very
same groove in which it had halted.  There were the golfers.
Was it possible that they were going on with their game?  Yes, there was
a fellow driving off from a tee, and that other group upon the green
were surely putting for the hole.  The reapers were slowly trooping
back to their work.  The nurse-girl slapped one of her charges
and then began to push the perambulator up the hill.  Everyone had
unconcernedly taken up the thread at the very point where they had
dropped it.

I rushed downstairs, but the hall door was open, and I heard
the voices of my companions, loud in astonishment and congratulation,
in the yard.  How we all shook hands and laughed as we came together,
and how Mrs. Challenger kissed us all in her emotion, before she
finally threw herself into the bear-hug of her husband.

"But they could not have been asleep!" cried Lord John.
"Dash it all, Challenger, you don't mean to believe that those folk
were asleep with their staring eyes and stiff limbs and that awful
death grin on their faces!"

"It can only have been the condition that is called catalepsy,"
said Challenger.  "It has been a rare phenomenon in the past
and has constantly been mistaken for death.  While it endures,
the temperature falls, the respiration disappears, the heartbeat
is indistinguishable--in fact, it IS death, save that it is evanescent.
Even the most comprehensive mind"--here he closed his eyes and
simpered--"could hardly conceive a universal outbreak of it in
this fashion."

"You may label it catalepsy," remarked Summerlee, "but, after all,
that is only a name, and we know as little of the result as we
do of the poison which has caused it.  The most we can say is that
the vitiated ether has produced a temporary death."

Austin was seated all in a heap on the step of the car.
It was his coughing which I had heard from above.  He had been
holding his head in silence, but now he was muttering to himself
and running his eyes over the car.

"Young fat-head!" he grumbled.  "Can't leave things alone!"

"What's the matter, Austin?"

"Lubricators left running, sir.  Someone has been fooling with the car.
I expect it's that young garden boy, sir."

Lord John looked guilty.

"I don't know what's amiss with me," continued Austin, staggering to
his feet.  "I expect I came over queer when I was hosing her down.
I seem to remember flopping over by the step.  But I'll swear I never
left those lubricator taps on."

In a condensed narrative the astonished Austin was told what had happened
to himself and the world.  The mystery of the dripping lubricators
was also explained to him.  He listened with an air of deep distrust
when told how an amateur had driven his car and with absorbed interest
to the few sentences in which our experiences of the sleeping city
were recorded.  I can remember his comment when the story was concluded.

"Was you outside the Bank of England, sir?"

"Yes, Austin."

"With all them millions inside and everybody asleep?"

"That was so."

"And I not there!" he groaned, and turned dismally once more
to the hosing of his car.

There was a sudden grinding of wheels upon gravel.
The old cab had actually pulled up at Challenger's door.
I saw the young occupant step out from it.  An instant later the maid,
who looked as tousled and bewildered as if she had that instant been
aroused from the deepest sleep, appeared with a card upon a tray.
Challenger snorted ferociously as he looked at it, and his thick black
hair seemed to bristle up in his wrath.

"A pressman!" he growled.  Then with a deprecating smile:
"After all, it is natural that the whole world should hasten to know
what I think of such an episode."

"That can hardly be his errand," said Summerlee, "for he was on
the road in his cab before ever the crisis came."

I looked at the card:  "James Baxter, London Correspondent,
New York Monitor."

"You'll see him?" said I.

"Not I."

"Oh, George!  You should be kinder and more considerate to others.
Surely you have learned something from what we have undergone."

He tut-tutted and shook his big, obstinate head.

"A poisonous breed!  Eh, Malone?  The worst weed in modern civilization,
the ready tool of the quack and the hindrance of the self-respecting man!
When did they ever say a good word for me?"

"When did you ever say a good word to them?"  I answered.
"Come, sir, this is a stranger who has made a journey to see you.
I am sure that you won't be rude to him."

"Well, well," he grumbled, "you come with me and do the talking.
I protest in advance against any such outrageous invasion of my
private life."  Muttering and mumbling, he came rolling after me
like an angry and rather ill-conditioned mastiff.

The dapper young American pulled out his notebook and plunged
instantly into his subject.

"I came down, sir," said he, "because our people in America
would very much like to hear more about this danger which is,
in your opinion, pressing upon the world."

"I know of no danger which is now pressing upon the world,"
Challenger answered gruffly.

The pressman looked at him in mild surprise.

"I meant, sir, the chances that the world might run into a belt
of poisonous ether."

"I do not now apprehend any such danger," said Challenger.

The pressman looked even more perplexed.

"You are Professor Challenger, are you not?" he asked.

"Yes, sir; that is my name."

"I cannot understand, then, how you can say that there is no such danger.
I am alluding to your own letter, published above your name
in the London Times of this morning."

It was Challenger's turn to look surprised.

"This morning?" said he.  "No London Times was published this morning."

"Surely, sir," said the American in mild remonstrance, "you must
admit that the London Times is a daily paper."  He drew out a copy
from his inside pocket.  "Here is the letter to which I refer."

Challenger chuckled and rubbed his hands.

"I begin to understand," said he.  "So you read this letter
this morning?"

"Yes, sir."

"And came at once to interview me?"

"Yes, sir."

"Did you observe anything unusual upon the journey down?"

"Well, to tell the truth, your people seemed more lively and generally
human than I have ever seen them.  The baggage man set out to tell
me a funny story, and that's a new experience for me in this country."

"Nothing else?"

"Why, no, sir, not that I can recall."

"Well, now, what hour did you leave Victoria?"

The American smiled.

"I came here to interview you, Professor, but it seems to be
a case of `Is this nigger fishing, or is this fish niggering?'
You're doing most of the work."

"It happens to interest me.  Do you recall the hour?"

"Sure.  It was half-past twelve."

"And you arrived?"

"At a quarter-past two."

"And you hired a cab?"

"That was so."

"How far do you suppose it is to the station?"

"Well, I should reckon the best part of two miles."

"So how long do you think it took you?"

"Well, half an hour, maybe, with that asthmatic in front."

"So it should be three o'clock?"

"Yes, or a trifle after it."

"Look at your watch."

The American did so and then stared at us in astonishment.

"Say!" he cried.  "It's run down.  That horse has broken
every record, sure.  The sun is pretty low, now that I come
to look at it.  Well, there's something here I don't understand."

"Have you no remembrance of anything remarkable as you came up
the hill?"

"Well, I seem to recollect that I was mighty sleepy once.

It comes back to me that I wanted to say something to the driver
and that I couldn't make him heed me.  I guess it was the heat,
but I felt swimmy for a moment.  That's all."

"So it is with the whole human race," said Challenger to me.
"They have all felt swimmy for a moment.  None of them have as yet
any comprehension of what has occurred.  Each will go on with his
interrupted job as Austin has snatched up his hose-pipe or the golfer
continued his game.  Your editor, Malone, will continue the issue
of his papers, and very much amazed he will be at finding that an issue
is missing.  Yes, my young friend," he added to the American reporter,
with a sudden mood of amused geniality, "it may interest you
to know that the world has swum through the poisonous current
which swirls like the Gulf Stream through the ocean of ether.
You will also kindly note for your own future convenience that
to-day is not Friday, August the twenty-seventh, but Saturday,
August the twenty-eighth, and that you sat senseless in your cab
for twenty-eight hours upon the Rotherfield hill."

And "right here," as my American colleague would say, I may bring
this narrative to an end.  It is, as you are probably aware,
only a fuller and more detailed version of the account which appeared
in the Monday edition of the Daily Gazette--an account which has been
universally admitted to be the greatest journalistic scoop of all time,
which sold no fewer than three-and-a-half million copies of the paper.
Framed upon the wall of my sanctum I retain those magnificent headlines:--


                TWENTY-EIGHT HOURS' WORLD COMA
                   UNPRECEDENTED EXPERIENCE
                     CHALLENGER JUSTIFIED
                   OUR CORRESPONDENT ESCAPES
                     ENTHRALLING NARRATIVE
                        THE OXYGEN ROOM
                       WEIRD MOTOR DRIVE
                          DEAD LONDON
                  REPLACING THE MISSING PAGE
                 GREAT FIRES AND LOSS OF LIFE
                        WILL IT RECUR?


Underneath this glorious scroll came nine and a half columns
of narrative, in which appeared the first, last, and only account
of the history of the planet, so far as one observer could draw it,
during one long day of its existence.  Challenger and Summerlee
have treated the matter in a joint scientific paper, but to me alone
was left the popular account.  Surely I can sing "Nunc dimittis."
What is left but anti-climax in the life of a journalist after that!

But let me not end on sensational headlines and a merely personal triumph.
Rather let me quote the sonorous passages in which the greatest
of daily papers ended its admirable leader upon the subject--
a leader which might well be filed for reference by every thoughtful man.

"It has been a well-worn truism," said the Times, "that our human race
are a feeble folk before the infinite latent forces which surround us.
From the prophets of old and from the philosophers of our own time the same
message and warning have reached us.  But, like all oft-repeated truths,
it has in time lost something of its actuality and cogency.
A lesson, an actual experience, was needed to bring it home.
It is from that salutory but terrible ordeal that we have just emerged,
with minds which are still stunned by the suddenness of the blow
and with spirits which are chastened by the realization of our own
limitations and impotence.  The world has paid a fearful price
for its schooling.  Hardly yet have we learned the full tale
of disaster, but the destruction by fire of New York, of Orleans,
and of Brighton constitutes in itself one of the greatest tragedies
in the history of our race.  When the account of the railway and
shipping accidents has been completed, it will furnish grim reading,
although there is evidence to show that in the vast majority
of cases the drivers of trains and engineers of steamers succeeded
in shutting off their motive power before succumbing to the poison.
But the material damage, enormous as it is both in life and
in property, is not the consideration which will be uppermost
in our minds to-day. All this may in time be forgotten.
But what will not be forgotten, and what will and should continue
to obsess our imaginations, is this revelation of the possibilities
of the universe, this destruction of our ignorant self-complacency,
and this demonstration of how narrow is the path of our material
existence and what abysses may lie upon either side of it.
Solemnity and humility are at the base of all our emotions to-day. May
they be the foundations upon which a more earnest and reverent race
may build a more worthy temple."


The End of Project Gutenberg etext of The Poison Belt