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.

Chapter IV

A DIARY OF THE DYING

How strange the words look scribbled at the top of the empty page of my
book! How stranger still that it is I, Edward Malone, who have written
them--I who started only some twelve hours ago from my rooms in Streatham
without one thought of the marvels which the day was to bring forth! I
look back at the chain of incidents, my interview with McArdle,
Challenger's first note of alarm in the Times, the absurd journey in the
train, the pleasant luncheon, the catastrophe, and now it has come to
this--that we linger alone upon an empty planet, and so sure is our fate
that I can regard these lines, written from mechanical professional habit
and never to be seen by human eyes, as the words of one who is already
dead, so closely does he stand to the shadowed borderland over which all
outside this one little circle of friends have already gone. I feel how
wise and true were the words of Challenger when he said that the real
tragedy would be if we were left behind when all that is noble and good
and beautiful had passed. But of that there can surely be no danger.
Already our second tube of oxygen is drawing to an end. We can count the
poor dregs of our lives almost to a minute.

We have just been treated to a lecture, a good quarter of an hour long,
from Challenger, who was so excited that he roared and bellowed as if he
were addressing his old rows of scientific sceptics in the Queen's Hall.
He had certainly a strange audience to harangue: his wife perfectly
acquiescent and absolutely ignorant of his meaning, Summerlee seated in
the shadow, querulous and critical but interested, Lord John lounging in
a corner somewhat bored by the whole proceeding, and myself beside the
window watching the scene with a kind of detached attention, as if it
were all a dream or something in which I had no personal interest
whatever. Challenger sat at the centre table with the electric light
illuminating the slide under the microscope which he had brought from his
dressing room. The small vivid circle of white light from the mirror
left ha