At the Earth's Core

At the Earth's Core

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

PROLOGUE

IN THE FIRST PLACE PLEASE BEAR IN MIND THAT I do not

expect you to believe this story. Nor could you wonder

had you witnessed a recent experience of mine when,

in the armor of blissful and stupendous ignorance,

I gaily narrated the gist of it to a Fellow of the Royal

Geological Society on the occasion of my last trip to London.

You would surely have thought that I had been detected

in no less a heinous crime than the purloining of the Crown

Jewels from the Tower, or putting poison in the coffee

of His Majesty the King.

The erudite gentleman in whom I confided congealed

before I was half through!--it is all that saved him

from exploding--and my dreams of an Honorary Fellowship,

gold medals, and a niche in the Hall of Fame faded into

the thin, cold air of his arctic atmosphere.

But I believe the story, and so would you, and so would

the learned Fellow of the Royal Geological Society, had you

and he heard it from the lips of the man who told it to me.

Had you seen, as I did, the fire of truth in those gray eyes;

had you felt the ring of sincerity in that quiet voice;

had you realized the pathos of it all--you, too, would believe.

You would not have needed the final ocular proof that I

had--the weird rhamphorhynchus-like creature which he

had brought back with him from the inner world.

I came upon him quite suddenly, and no less unexpectedly,

upon the rim of the great Sahara Desert. He was standing

before a goat-skin tent amidst a clump of date palms within

a tiny oasis. Close by was an Arab douar of some eight

or ten tents.

I had come down from the north to hunt lion. My party

consisted of a dozen children of the desert--I was the only

"white" man. As we approached the little clump of verdure

I saw the man come from his tent and with hand-shaded eyes

peer intently at us. At sight of me he advanced rapidly

to meet us.

"A white man!" he cried. "May the good Lord be praised! I

have been watching you for hours, hoping against hope that

THIS time there would be a white man. Tell me the date.

What year is it?"

And when I had told him he staggered as though he had

been struck full in the face, so that he was compelled

to grasp my stirrup leather for support.

"It cannot be!" he cried after a moment. "It cannot be!

Tell me that you are mistaken, or that you are but joking."

"I am telling you the truth, my friend," I replied.

"Why should I deceive a stranger, or attempt to, in so

simple a matter as the date?"

For some time he stood in silence, with bowed head.

"Ten years!" he murmured, at last. "Ten years, and I

thought that at the most it could be scarce more than one!"

That night he told me his story--the story that I give you

here as nearly in his own words as I can recall them.