Mr. Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, rose among the audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with the withered aspect of a theologian.  He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether the results to which he had alluded in his remarks had been obtained during a journey to the headwaters of the Amazon made by him two years before.

Professor Challenger answered that they had.

Mr. Summerlee desired to know how it was that Professor Challenger claimed to have made discoveries in those regions which had been overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previous explorers of established scientific repute.

Professor Challenger answered that Mr. Summerlee appeared to be confusing the Amazon with the Thames; that it was in reality a somewhat larger river; that Mr. Summerlee might be interested to know that with the Orinoco, which communicated with it, some fifty thousand miles of country were opened up, and that in so vast a space it was not impossible for one person to find what another had missed.

Mr. Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fully appreciated the difference between the Thames and the Amazon, which lay in the fact that any assertion about the former could be tested, while about the latter it could not.  He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would give the latitude and the longitude of the country in which prehistoric animals were to be found.

Professor Challenger replied that he reserved such information for good reasons of his own, but would be prepared to give it with proper precautions to a committee chosen from the audience.  Would Mr. Summerlee serve on such a committee and test his story in person?

Mr. Summerlee:  “Yes, I will.” (Great cheering.)

Professor Challenger:  “Then I guarantee that I will place in your hands such material as will enable you to find your way.  It is only right, however, since Mr. Summerlee goes to check my statement that I should have one or more with him who may check his.  I will not disguise from you that there are difficulties and dangers.  Mr. Summerlee will need a younger colleague.  May I ask for volunteers?”

It is thus that the great crisis of a man’s life springs out at him.  Could I have imagined when I entered that hall that I was about to pledge myself to a wilder adventure than had ever come to me in my dreams?  But Gladys—­was it not the very opportunity of which she spoke?  Gladys would have told me to go.  I had sprung to my feet.  I was speaking, and yet I had prepared no words.  Tarp Henry, my companion, was plucking at my skirts and I heard him whispering, “Sit down, Malone!  Don’t make a public ass of yourself.”  At the same time I was aware that a tall, thin man, with dark gingery hair, a few seats in front of me, was also upon his feet.  He glared back at me with hard angry eyes, but I refused to give way.

“I will go, Mr. Chairman,” I kept repeating over and over again.