The Lost World / Затерянный мир

There followed several pages which were filled with small sketches of Indians. Studies of women and babies accounted for several more pages, and then there was an unbroken series of animal drawings.

“I could see nothing unusual.”

“Try the next page,” said he with a smile.

It was a full-page sketch of a landscape in colour… the kind of painting which an open-air artist takes as a guide to a future more elaborate effort. I could see high hills covered with light-green trees. Above the hills there were dark red cliffs.

They looked like an unbroken wall. Near the cliffs there was a pyramidal rock, crowned by a great tree. Behind it all, a blue tropical sky.

“Well?” he asked.

“It is no doubt a curious formation,” said I “but I am not geologist enough to say that it is wonderful.”

“Wonderful!” he repeated. “It is unique. It is incredible. No one on earth has ever dreamed of such a possibility. Now the next.”

I turned it over, and gave an exclamation of surprise.

There was a full-page picture of the most extraordinary creature that I had ever seen. It was the wild dream of an opium smoker. The head was like that of a bird, the body that of a large lizard. The tail was covered with sharp spikes. In front of this creature there was a small man, or dwarf, who stood looking at it.

“Well, what do you think of that?” cried the Professor, rubbing his hands with triumph.

“It is monstrous… grotesque.”

“But what made him draw such an animal?”

“Gin, I think.

”

“Oh, that’s the best explanation you can give, is it?”

“Well, sir, what is yours?”

“The creature exists. That is actually sketched from the life.”

I should have laughed only that I remembered our Catharine-wheel down the passage.

“No doubt,” said I, “no doubt… But this tiny human figure puzzles me. If it were an Indian we could set it down as evidence of some pigmy race in America, but it is a European.

”

“Look here!” he cried, “You see that plant behind the animal; I suppose you thought it was a flower? Well, it is a huge palm. He sketched himself to give a scale of heights.”

“Good heavens!” I cried. “Then you think the beast was so huge…”

I had turned over the leaves but there was nothing more in the book.

“… a single sketch by a wandering American artist. You can’t, as a man of science, defend such a position as that.