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.
