📔 The Lost World

Quotes from this book

We all stopped to examine that monstrous spoor. If it were indeed a bird - and what animal could leave such a mark? - its foot was so much larger than an ostrich's that its height upon the same scale must be enormous. The affluents of the Amazon are, half of them, of this nature, while the other half are whitish and opaque, the difference depending upon the class of country through which they have flowed. "He's a hard nail, is Jack, and a dead shot, too, but you can't leave a Grand National winner to die like that - what?" "And that the germ plasm is different from the parthenogenetic egg?" "Why, surely!" I cried, and gloried in my own audacity. Once some bandy-legged, lurching creature, an ant-eater or a bear, scuttled clumsily amid the shadows. Even Challenger was affected by the consideration that his enemies would never stand confuted if the confirmation of his statements should never reach those who had doubted them. Like a dado round the room was the jutting line of splendid heavy game-heads, the best of their sort from every quarter of the world, with the rare white rhinoceros of the Lado Enclave drooping its supercilious lip above them all. "This is a Bland's .577 axite express," said he. "I got that big fellow with it." He glanced up at the white rhinoceros. "Second one vamped up for the occasion. If you are clever and know your business you can fake a bone as easily as you can a photograph." All the paper that I possess consists of five old note-books and a lot of scraps, and I have only the one stylographic pencil; but so long as I can move my hand I will continue to set down our experiences and impressions[.] They were small men, wiry, active, and well-built, with lank black hair tied up in a bunch behind their heads with a leathern thong, and leathern also were their loin-clothes. "You got a black eye out of him, and that's for publication. We can't have this reign of terror, Mr. Malone. We must bring the man to his bearings. I'll have a leaderette on him to-morrow that will raise a blister." "Now, when you described the Wigan coal explosion last month, could you not have gone down and helped those people, in spite of the choke-damp?" "I did." "You never said so." "There was nothing worth bucking about." "I didn't know." She looked at me with rather more interest. They tied us up—the fellow who handled me could tie like a bosun—and there we lay with our toes up, beneath a tree, while a great brute stood guard over us with a club in his hand. "It was the same direction from which the American had come. Something terrible lay that way. It was my business to find out what it was." "What did you do?" My flippancy was all gone. "And that telegony is still sub judice?" "Undoubtedly." "And that the germ plasm is different from the parthenogenetic egg?" "Why, surely!" I cried, and gloried in my own audacity. I am tender-hearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare. For one moment I had a vision of a horrible mask like a giant toad's, of a warty, leprous skin, and of a loose mouth all beslobbered with fresh blood.