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Mrs. Challenger sank back against a chair as if all strength had left her. I felt powerfully sympathetic toward her plight, but Holmes, of course, was quite correct in his assertion. Without a map, without a guide, it would be like seeking a single lost speck of sand from among all the beaches of the world.

“Now see here, sir,” the Prime Minister blocked the door. “We do not request, but rather, command this duty of you, Mr. Sherlock Holmes. It is by royal decree that you undertake this mission, regardless of your personal feelings in the matter. Whatever the chances, or the odds, England must have that formula or our boys fighting for our liberty in the trenches will be slaughtered like sitting fowl. Even if there’s only the merest possibility of Challenger’s miraculous survival, surely the World’s Greatest Detective can discover this lone indispensable needle in a haystack for the sake of his nation?”

I didn’t like the hot rapacious gleam in Holmes’ eyes as he stalked so closely to the Prime Minister that his aquiline nose nearly brushed the suddenly fluttering mustache. A quiet knock at the door stayed his reply, for the moment.

Mycroft Holmes opened the door, receiving a calling card from the butler. His watery grey eyes were astonished as he read the name aloud.

“Apparently, Professor Challenger is … here.”

The room was silent as a confessional until broken by the clack of a lady’s boots.

Into the chamber stepped a tall, golden-haired young woman of twenty-eight or thirty. Her striking features were, somehow, familiar and yet the intense grey-green eyes almost buried her beauty behind a gaze of such piercing intelligence that I have never before witnessed in one so young and fair. She was, at once, Athena and Artemis, molded into the same divine being.

“Indeed, gentlemen,” her voice was low though not unmusical, supremely confident in her rapid inflection. “Professor Jessica Cuvier Challenger — doctor of medicine, zoology, and anthropology.”

Mrs. Challenger was clearly aghast.

“Jess … you promised—” she started and stammered, but the vivacious Amazon waved her aside.

“Not the first time I’ve broken such a ridiculous oath, Mother, dear,” Professor Challenger held a telegram in her graceful hand. “As is my habit, I’ve managed to discover the very thing that all of you are so desperately searching for. I am, in truth, my father’s daughter!”

She turned her cool scientist’s eyes upon each of us and finally relinquished the telegram to Sherlock Holmes. After scanning it, Holmes handed it to me with a smile of satisfaction. It was sent from Central America. I’m reprinting the message below exactly as written:

DELIGHTED TO GUIDE MR. SHERLOCK HOLMES TO LOST WORLD. WILL LAY ODDS THAT OLD SON OF A BITCH CHALLENGER

IS STILL ALIVE.

— LORD JOHN ROXTON

The cave man had slept for two full days. His belly again gnawed at him to be filled, but it was the desiccation of his painfully parched throat which provoked the descent from his protective little grotto fortress in the limestone cliff. He had chosen this refuge principally because of the small stream of fresh water that poured continually near its hidden entrance, but an aberrant ten-day drought had caused the flow to vanish.

There was no avoiding it. Gathering up his club and spear, slipping his treasured doeskin medicine bag around his burly neck, a chill raised the hackles along the caveman’s spine. His aching, adventure-etched body was already going through the motions before his clouded mind caught up with it. He must return to that monstrous river or die.

The long, snakishly winding, narrow river was an awful place, indeed. It was there that many of the terrible, most massive creatures of the Plateau came to sate their unfathomable thirst. Canopied in black-green shadows from towering vine-webbed branches, even at high noon, the river banks were a twilight world of creeping, crawling, living delirium and unseen impending death.

The cave man waited impatiently behind a concealing boulder, his swollen tongue