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.
