The Lost World quotes

Mr. Hungerton, her father, really was the most tactless person upon earth⁠—a fluffy, feathery, untidy cockatoo of a man, perfectly good-natured, but absolutely centered upon his own silly self.

If anything could have driven me from Gladys, it would have been the thought of such a father-in-law.

“Shall I tell you?” he cooed.

“It proves,” he roared, with a sudden blast of fury, “that you are the damnedest imposter in London⁠—a vile, crawling journalist, who has no more science than he has decency in his composition!”

He had sprung to his feet with a mad rage in his eyes.

“

Hope you know your Gordon, for he’s the poet of the horse and the gun and the man that handles both.

Now, here’s a useful tool—.470, telescopic sight, double ejector, point-blank up to three-fifty. That’s the rifle I used against the Peruvian slave-drivers three years ago.

I’m like an old golf ball—I’ve had all the white paint knocked off me long ago. Life can whack me about now, and it can’t leave a mark.

But a sportin’ risk, young fellah, that’s the salt of existence.

Then it’s worth livin’ again. We’re all gettin’ a deal too soft and dull and comfy. Give me the great waste lands and the wide spaces, with a gun in my fist and somethin’ to look for that’s worth findin’.

I learned, however, that day once for all that both Summerlee and Challenger possessed that highest type of bravery, the bravery of the scientific mind. Theirs was the spirit which upheld Darwin among the gauchos of the Argentine or Wallace among the headhunters of Malaya.

It is decreed by a merciful Nature that the human brain cannot think of two things simultaneously, so that if it be steeped in curiosity as to science it has no room for merely personal considerations.

All day amid that incessant and mysterious menace our two Professors watched every bird upon the wing, and every shrub upon the bank, with many a sharp wordy contention, when the snarl of Summerlee came quick upon the deep growl of Challenger, but with no …

Summerlee burst into derisive laughter

“A pter-fiddlestick!” said he. “It was a stork, if ever I saw one.”

Challenger was too furious to speak. He simply swung his pack upon his back and continued upon his march. Lord John came abreast of me, however, and his face was more grave than was his wont. He had his Zeiss glasses in his hand.

There was no sneer upon his thin lips, but, on the contrary, a gray, drawn look of excitement and amazement. Challenger saw it, too, and reveled in the first taste of victory.

“Of course,” said he, with his clumsy and ponderous sarcasm, “Professor Summerlee will understand that when I speak of a pterodactyl I mean a stork⁠—only it is the kind of stork which has no feathers, a leathery skin, membranous wings, and teeth in its jaws.”

He grinned and blinked and bowed until his colleague turned and walked away.

It was handsomely said, and the two men for the first time shook hands. So much we have gained by this clear vision of our first pterodactyl.

It was worth a stolen supper to bring two such men together.

But if prehistoric life existed upon the plateau it was not superabundant, for we had no further glimpse of it during the next three days.

We were still discussing it, endeavoring to adjust our minds to these new conditions, when a singular scene in the plain below arrested our attention.

A man in white clothes, who could only be the surviving half-breed, was running as one does run when Death is the pacemaker.

Behind him, only a few yards in his rear, bounded the huge ebony figure of Zambo, our devoted negro. Even as we looked, he sprang upon the back of the fugitive and flung his arms round his neck. They rolled on the ground together.

Our two traitors had been destroyed, but the mischief that they had done lived after them. By no possible means could we get back to the pinnacle.

We had been natives of the world; now we were natives of the plateau.

The two things were separate and apart. There was the plain which led to the canoes. Yonder, beyond the violet, hazy horizon, was the stream which led back to civilization. But the link between was missing.

“My dear Summerlee, I will tell you with great confidence exactly what they will say in England,” said Challenger.

“They will say that you are an infernal liar and a scientific charlatan, exactly as you and others said of me.”

“In the face of photographs?”

… its own stone, tall, gray, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely motionless save for the rolling of their red eyes or an occasional snap of their rattrap beaks as a dragonfly went past them.

Their huge, membranous wings were closed by folding their forearms, so that they sat like gigantic old women, wrapped in hideous web-colored shawls, and with their ferocious heads protruding above them.

Large and small, not less than a thousand of these filthy creatures lay in the hollow before us.

It was bowl-shaped and at the bottom, some hundreds of yards from where we lay, were pools of green-scummed, stagnant water, fringed with bullrushes.

It was a weird place in itself, but its occupants made it seem like a scene from the Seven Circles of Dante.

The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs.

But now, if you are of my opinion, we have had thrills enough for one day, and had best get back to the surgical box at the camp for some carbolic. Who knows what venom these beasts may have in their hideous jaws?”

But surely no men ever had just such a day since the world began.

Some fresh surprise was ever in store for us. When, following the course of our brook, we at last reached our glade and saw the thorny barricade of our camp, we thought that our adventures were at an end.

We clapped our hands to our ears to shut out that nerve-shaking appeal. A cold sweat broke out over my body, and my heart turned sick at the misery of it.

All the woes of tortured life, all its stupendous indictment of high heaven, its innumerable sorrows, seemed to be centered and condensed into that one dreadful, agonized cry.

And then, under this high-pitched, ringing sound there was another, more intermittent, a low, deep-chested laugh, a growling, throaty gurgle of merriment which formed a grotesque accompaniment to the shriek with which it was blended.

“No, it must not get over,” cried Lord John; “but hold your fire to the last. Perhaps I can make something of the fellow. I’ll chance it, anyhow.”

It was as brave an act as ever I saw a man do.

He stooped to the fire, picked up a blazing branch, and slipped in an instant through a sally-port which he had made in our gateway. The thing moved forward with a dreadful snarl.

“Exactly. Any one of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs would meet the case. Among them are to be found all the most terrible types of animal life that have ever cursed the earth or blessed a museum.”

He laughed sonorously at his own conceit, for, though he had little sense of humor, the crudest pleasantry from his own lips moved him always to roars of appreciation.

“The less noise the better,” said Lord Roxton, curtly. “We don’t know who or what may be near us. If this fellah comes back for his breakfast and catches us here we won’t have so much to laugh at.

“Exactly. Any one of the larger carnivorous dinosaurs would meet the case.

Among them are to be found all the most terrible types of animal life that have ever cursed the earth or blessed a museum.

” He laughed sonorously at his own conceit, for, though he had little sense of humor, the crudest pleasantry from his own lips moved him always to roars of appreciation.

“And I venture to trust we may not,” I observed.

The Professor only raised his great eyebrows, as the schoolmaster meets the irrelevant observation of the naughty boy.

“Perhaps Professor Summerlee may have an observation to make,” he said, and the two savants ascended together into some rarefied scientific atmosphere, where the possibilities of a modification of the birthrate were weighed against the decline of the food supply as a check in the …

(You will excuse the frankness of this report, will you not, sir?) “He’d never forgive me for leaving such unexhausted copy behind me. Besides, so far as I can see it is not worth discussing, since we can’t get down, even if we wanted.”

“Our young friend makes up for many obvious mental lacunae by some measure of primitive common sense,” remarked Challenger.

“The interests of his deplorable profession are immaterial to us; but, as he observes, we cannot get down in any case, so it is a waste of energy to discuss it.”

“Well,” said Challenger, “I admit that my mind will be more at ease when I am assured that the result of our expedition has been conveyed to our friends. How we are to get down from this place I have not as yet an idea.

I have never yet encountered any problem, however, which my inventive brain was unable to solve, and I promise you that tomorrow I will turn my attention to the question of our descent.

” And so the matter was allowed to rest.

I have never yet encountered any problem, however, which my inventive brain was unable to solve, and I promise you that tomorrow I will turn my attention to the question of our descent.” And so the matter was allowed to rest.

But that evening, by the light of the fire and of a single candle, the first map of the lost world was elaborated.

Every detail which I had roughly noted from my watchtower was drawn out in its relative place. Challenger’s pencil hovered over the great blank which marked the lake.

“I trust, sir, that my name will have other and more personal claims upon posterity,” said Challenger, severely.

“Any ignoramus can hand down his worthless memory by imposing it upon a mountain or a river. I need no such monument.”

Summerlee, with a twisted smile, was about to make some fresh assault when Lord John hastened to intervene.

Challenger looked at me sympathetically, and shook his great head in mock disapproval.

“Boys will be boys,” said he. “Lake Gladys let it be.”

As the youngster of the party, not merely in years, but in experience, character, knowledge, and all that goes to make a man, I had been overshadowed from the first. And now I was coming into my own. I warmed at the thought.

Alas! for the pride which goes before a fall!

That little glow of self-satisfaction, that added measure of self-confidence, were to lead me on that very night to the most dreadful experience of my life, ending with a shock which turns my heart sick when I think of it.

I had not gone a hundred yards before I deeply repented my rashness. I may have said somewhere in this chronicle that

I am too imaginative to be a really courageous man, but that I have an overpowering fear of seeming afraid.

This was the power which now carried me onwards. I simply could not slink back with nothing done. Even if my comrades should not have missed me, and should never know of my weakness, there would still remain some intolerable self-shame in my own soul.

And yet I shuddered at the position in which I found myself, and would have given all I possessed at that moment to have been honorably free of the whole business.

It was dreadful in the forest.

The trees grew so thickly and their foliage spread so widely that I could see nothing of the moonlight save that here and there the high branches made a tangled filigree against the starry sky.

… into which the huge saurians could not penetrate, while with their developed brains they were capable of setting such traps, covered with branches, across the paths which marked the run of the animals as would destroy them in spite of all their strength and activity.

Man was always the master.

The sloping wall of the pit was not difficult for an active man to climb, but I hesitated long before I trusted myself within reach of the dreadful creature which had so nearly destroyed me.

I could have torn my hair and beaten my head in my despair.

Only now did I realize how I had learned to lean upon my companions, upon the serene self-confidence of Challenger, and upon the masterful, humorous coolness of Lord John Roxton.

Without them I was like a child in the dark, helpless and powerless. I did not know which way to turn or what I should do first.

I could have torn my hair and beaten my head in my despair. Only now did I realize how I had learned to lean upon my companions, upon the serene self-confidence of Challenger, and upon the masterful, humorous coolness of Lord John Roxton.

Without them I was like a child in the dark, helpless and powerless.

I did not know which way to turn or what I should do first.

“Pretty bad,” said he, when he had heard of the dinosaur and the pit. “It isn’t quite the place for a rest cure. What? But I had no idea what its possibilities were until those devils got hold of us.

The man-eatin’ Papuans had me once, but they are Chesterfields compared to this crowd.

”

I call them apes, but they carried sticks and stones in their hands and jabbered talk to each other, and ended up by tyin’ our hands with creepers, so they are ahead of any beast that I have seen in my wanderin’s.

Ape-men⁠—that’s what they are⁠—missin’ links, and I wish they had stayed missin’.

They carried off their wounded comrade—he was bleedin’ like a pig—and then they sat around us, and if ever I saw frozen murder it was in their faces. They were big fellows, as big as a man and a deal stronger.

They all jabbered and chattered together. Then one of them stood out beside Challenger. You’ll smile, young fellah, but ’pon my word they might have been kinsmen. I couldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

This old ape-man⁠—he was their chief⁠—was a sort of red Challenger, with every one of our friend’s beauty points, only just a trifle more so.

He had the short body, the big shoulders, the round chest, no neck, a great ruddy frill of a beard, the tufted eyebrows, the ‘What do you want, damn you!’ look about the eyes, and the whole catalogue.

I have tried to imitate here Lord Roxton’s jerky talk, his short, strong sentences, the half-humorous, half-reckless tone that ran through it all.

But he was a born leader. As danger thickened his jaunty manner would increase, his speech become more racy, his cold eyes glitter into ardent life, and his Don Quixote moustache bristle with joyous excitement.

His love of danger, his intense appreciation of the drama of an adventure—all the more intense for being held tightly in—his consistent view that every peril in life is a form of sport, a fierce game betwixt you and Fate, with death as a forfeit, …

“Shoot into the thick of them! Shoot! sonny, shoot!” cried my companion.

There are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man.

I am tenderhearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare. Yet the blood lust was on me now.

There are strange red depths in the soul of the most commonplace man.

I am tenderhearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare. Yet the blood lust was on me now.

I found myself on my feet emptying one magazine, then the other, clicking open the breech to reload, snapping it to again, while cheering and yelling with pure ferocity and joy of slaughter as I did so.

“He can’t stick your appearance, Challenger; and, by George! I don’t wonder. All right, little chap, he’s only a human, just the same as the rest of us.”

“Really, sir!” cried the Professor.

“Well, it’s lucky for you, Challenger, that you are a little out of the ordinary. If you hadn’t been so like the king—”

“Really, sir!” cried the Professor.

“Well, it’s lucky for you, Challenger, that you are a little out of the ordinary. If you hadn’t been so like the king⁠—”

“Upon my word, Lord John, you allow yourself great latitude.”

“I leave the matter to your discretion.” Then, after a long pause, he added:

“The king of the ape-men was really a creature of great distinction⁠—a most remarkably handsome and intelligent personality. Did it not strike you?”

“A most remarkable creature,” said I.

“A most remarkable creature,” said I.

And the Professor, much eased in his mind, settled down to his slumber once more.

Then, placing his hand upon his breast and holding himself with great dignity, he uttered the word “Maretas” several times.

The Professor, unabashed, seized the nearest Indian by the shoulder and proceeded to lecture upon him as if he were a potted specimen in a classroom.

“The type of these people,” said he in his sonorous fashion, “whether judged by cranial capacity, facial angle, or any other test, cannot be regarded as a low one;

Then, at his order, the whole tribe lay down upon the ground before us in homage. Personally I felt shy and uncomfortable at this obsequious adoration, and I read the same feeling in the faces of Roxton and Summerlee, but

Challenger expanded like a flower in the sun.

“They may be undeveloped types,” said he, stroking his beard and looking round at them, “but their deportment in the presence of their superiors might be a lesson to some of our more advanced Europeans. Strange how correct are the instincts of the natural man!”

I assure you that I little thought when I left my professional chair in London that it was for the purpose of heading a raid of savages upon a colony of anthropoid apes.”

“To such base uses do we come,” said Lord John, smiling.

“But we are up against it, so what’s the decision?”

“An inflammable gas, and one markedly lighter than the atmosphere. I should say beyond doubt that it contained a considerable proportion of free hydrogen.

The resources of G. E. C. are not yet exhausted, my young friend. I may yet show you how a great mind molds all nature to its use.

” He swelled with some secret purpose, but would say no more.

Here they spread out into a long straggling line of spearmen and bowmen. Roxton and Summerlee took their position upon the right flank, while Challenger and I were on the left.

It was a host of the stone age that we were accompanying to battle⁠—we with the last word of the gunsmith’s art from St. James’ Street and the Strand.

We had not long to wait for our enemy. A wild shrill clamor rose from the edge of the wood and suddenly a body of ape-men rushed out with clubs and stones, and made for the center of the Indian line.

What, my friends, is the conquest of one nation by another? It is meaningless. Each produces the same result.

But those fierce fights, when in the dawn of the ages the cave-dwellers held their own against the tiger folk, or the elephants first found that they had a master, those were the real conquests⁠—the victories that count.

By this strange turn of fate we have seen and helped to decide even such a contest. Now upon this plateau the future must ever be for man.”

He looked at me with a very questioning eye, and I read hesitation in his face.

“Don’t you think other people besides Professors can want to know things?”

he said at last. “I’m studyin’ the pretty dears. That’s enough for you.”

I may say that he seemed to possess an extraordinary fascination for the Indian women, and that he always carried a large spreading palm branch with which he beat them off as if they were flies, when their attentions became too pressing.

To see him walking like a comic opera sultan, with this badge of authority in his hand, his black beard bristling in front of him, his toes pointing at each step, and a train of wide-eyed Indian girls behind him, clad in their slender drapery of bark cloth, is one of the most grotesque of all the pictures which I will carry back with me.

As to Summerlee, he was absorbed in the insect and bird life of the plateau, and spent his whole time (save that considerable portion which was devoted to abusing Challenger for not getting us out of our difficulties) in cleaning and mounting his specimens.

In half an hour a good-sized gasbag had been formed, and the jerking and straining upon the thongs showed that it was capable of considerable lift.

Challenger, like a glad father in the presence of his firstborn, stood smiling and stroking his beard, in silent, self-satisfied content as he gazed at the creation of his brain.

It was Summerlee who first broke the silence.

Lord John was delighted with the whole idea.

“Clever old dear, ain’t he?”

he whispered to me, and then louder to Challenger. “What about a car?”

I had just time to throw my arms round his ascending waist when I was myself whipped up into the air. Lord John had me with a rattrap grip round the legs, but I felt that he also was coming off the ground.

For a moment I had a vision of four adventurers floating like a string of sausages over the land that they had explored.

But, happily, there were limits to the strain which the rope would stand, though none apparently to the lifting powers of this infernal machine. There was a sharp crack, and we were in a heap upon the ground with coils of rope all over us.

Even as we looked a high whickering cry, the call of some weird animal, rang clear out of the darkness.

It was the very voice of Maple White Land bidding us goodbye.

We turned and plunged into the cave which led to home.

And so, in humble and thankful mood, I close this account.

Our eyes have seen great wonders and our souls are chastened by what we have endured.

Each is in his own way a better and deeper man. It may be that when we reach Pará we shall stop to refit. If we do, this letter will be a mail ahead.