Part 9 (1/2)

shouted the accused, and disappeared like a jack-in-the-box) ”If any person in this hall dares to doubt lad to have a feords with hiain the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into the air) ”If I co you----” (General chorus of ”Cos for so both his ar the music The Professor, with his face flushed, his nostrils dilated, and his beard bristling, was now in a proper Berserk reat discoverer has been eneration of fools When great facts are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the iination which would help you to understand them You can only throw mud at the men who have risked their lives to open new fields to science You persecute the prophets! Galileo! Darwin, and I----” (Prolonged cheering and complete interruption)

All this is froive little notion of the absolute chaos to which the assembly had by this time been reduced So terrific was the uproar that several ladies had already beaten a hurried retreat Grave and reverend seniors see spirit as badly as the students, and I sahite-beardedtheir fists at the obdurate Professor The whole great audience seethed and si pot The Professor took a step forward and raised both his hands There was so and virile in the radually away before his coesture and his e

They hushed to hear it

”I will not detain you,” he said ”It is not worth it Truth is truth, and the noise of a nu men--and, I fear I must add, of their equally foolish seniors--cannot affect the matter

I claim that I have opened a new field of science You dispute it”

(Cheers) ”Then I put you to the test Will you accredit one or o out as your representatives and test my statement in your name?”

Mr Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Co the audience, a tall, thin, bitter ian He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether the results to which he had alluded in his re a journey to the headwaters of the Aer answered that they had

Mr Suer claiions which had been overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previous explorers of established scientific repute

Professor Challenger answered that Mr Su the Aer river; that Mr Suht be interested to know that with the Orinoco, which communicated with it, some fifty thousand miles of country were opened up, and that in so vast a space it was not impossible for one person to find what another had missed

Mr Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fully appreciated the difference between the Thames and the Amazon, which lay in the fact that any assertion about the former could be tested, while about the latter it could not He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitude of the country in which prehistoric anier replied that he reserved such inforive it with proper precautions to a committee chosen from the audience Would Mr

Summerlee serve on such a committee and test his story in person?

Mr Su)

Professor Challenger: ”Then I guarantee that I will place in your hands such ht, however, since Mr Suoes to check my statement that I should have one or uise froers Mr

Suue May I ask for volunteers?”

It is thus that the great crisis of a ined when I entered that hall that I was about to pledge myself to a wilder adventure than had ever come to me in my dreams? But Gladys--was it not the very opportunity of which she spoke? Gladys would have told , and yet I had prepared no words Tarp Henry,at , ”Sit down, Malone! Don't make a public ass of yourself” At the saery hair, a few seats in front of ry eyes, but I refused to give way

”I will go, Mr Chairain

”Name! Name!” cried the audience

”My name is Edward Dunn Malone I am the reporter of the Daily Gazette I claim to be an absolutely unprejudiced witness”

”What is YOUR name, sir?” the chairman asked of my tall rival

”I am Lord John Roxton I have already been up the Around, and have special qualifications for this investigation”

”Lord John Roxton's reputation as a sportsman and a traveler is, of course, world-famous,” said the chairman; ”at the same time it would certainly be as well to have a member of the Press upon such an expedition”

”Then I entle, to accoate and to report upon the truth of , our fate was decided, and I found myself borne away in the human current which swirled towards the door, with my mind half stunned by the vast new project which had risen so suddenly before it As I eed fro students--down the pave a heavy umbrella, which rose and fell in the roans and cheers, Professor Challenger's electric brougha under the silvery lights of Regent Street, full of thoughts of Gladys and of wonder as to my future