We are introduced to Professor Challenger:
He sat in a rotating chair behind a broad table, which was covered with books, maps, and diagrams. As I entered, his seat spun round to face me. His appearance made me gasp. I was prepared for something strange, but not for so overpowering a personality as this. It was his size which took one's breath away—his size and his imposing presence. His head was enormous, the largest I have ever seen upon a human being. I am sure that his top-hat, had I ever ventured to don it, would have slipped over me entirely and rested on my shoulders. He had the face and beard which I associate with an Assyrian bull; the former florid, the latter so black as almost to have a suspicion of blue, spade-shaped and rippling down over his chest. The hair was peculiar, plastered down in front in a long, curving wisp over his massive forehead. The eyes were blue-gray under great black tufts, very clear, very critical, and very masterful. A huge spread of shoulders and a chest like a barrel were the other parts of him which appeared above the table, save for two enormous hands covered with long black hair. This and a bellowing, roaring, rumbling voice made up my first impression of the notorious Professor Challenger.
You have read the various adventures of Sherlock of course and if you have rested there you have committed a grave mistake. There is much much more that is readable and entertaining in the oeuvre of A.C. Doyle. Humour, wit, invention, description of flora and fauna abound, nay ebulliate. Adventure across the world to known, unknown and lost worlds beckon. There is always too a hint of the possible not entirely fanciful in his fantasy. Could there be an isolated closed territory in which evolution has paused and dinosaurs roam the earth? In other words the title of the movie ought to be ‘Lost World: Jurassic Park’.
All the tropes of adventure are there, the fragmentary map, the barely credible gasp of the expiring traveller, unexplored regions, trusty bearers trudging through vile mosquito infested swamps and the trappings of imperial power, a giant negro by the name of Zemba faithful and as intelligent as a horse. Yes Massa the map of the world was pink and if that upsets you, stay at home you lily livered shirker.
In this volume you get not one but two mad scientists, Challenger and Summerlee; a blue blooded knight of the realm,explorer and sportsman Roxton and finally the narrator Malone the naive but intrepid reporter. Where are you bound for?
What is the result? Why, the ordinary laws of Nature are suspended. The various checks which influence the struggle for existence in the world at large are all neutralized or altered. Creatures survive which would otherwise disappear. You will observe that both the pterodactyl and the stegosaurus are Jurassic, and therefore of a great age in the order of life. They have been artificially conserved by those strange accidental conditions."
Bring sun block.
