ABSTRACT
With his Assyrian beard and prodigious voice, Professor Challenger was known to shock audiences with his exorbitant remarks and gestures. Lecturing before a large crowd gathered in Doyle’s short story “When the World Screamed,” the professor introduces one of his most daring experiments by stating that “ ‘the whole matter is very fully and lucidly discussed in my forthcoming volume upon the earth, which I may describe with all due modesty as one of the epoch-making books of the world’s history. (General interruption and cries of “Get down to the facts!” “What are we here for?” “Is this a practical joke?”).’”1 Challenger, a brilliant if eccentric scientist, is unaffiliated with any university, and in this experiment he seeks to contact the earth itself, which he proclaims to be a living entity. As he explains to the story’s narrator, “a self-styled expert in artesian boring,” the earth is modeled on “ ‘a sea urchin-a common echinus.’ ” Holding one of these creatures in his massive simian hands, the professor continues, “ ‘Nature repeats itself in many forms regardless of the size. This echinus is a model, a prototype, of the world.’”Just as the sea urchin gets its nourishment from the water surrounding it, so too the “‘earth browses upon a circular path in the fields of space, and as it moves the ether is continually pouring through it and providing its vitality.’ ”2
To field test his model, Professor Challenger has enlisted the boring expert, a Mr. Peerless Jones, and contracted him to operate a special drill bit as part of a public experiment. Challenger seeks to drill home his theory by digging some eight miles down into the earth’s strata. He has alreadypassed through “the sallow lower chalk, the coffee-colored Hastings beds,
the lighter Ashburnham beds, the dark carboniferous clays, and then,gleaming in the electric light, bands and bands of jet-black, sparkling coal alternating with rings of clay.”3 And indeed, as predicted by his theory, at the shaft’s bottom he has found something truly amazing: a moist, palpitating flesh whose surface glistens under the light, gray and gelatinous. It is this surface that the professor plans to harpoon with the expert’s incisive bitand to do so in the name of Challenger. “‘I propose to let the earth know that there is at least one person, George Edward Challenger, who calls for attention-who, indeed, insists upon attention. It is certainly the first intimation it has ever had of the sort.’”4 For this audacious experiment-which is nothing less than the challenging forth of the world-the professor has gathered together a large number of his peers (assuming, that is, that he has any). There are heads of learned societies, members of Parliament and the royal family, as well as his most adamant critics, those representing the popular press. Challenger has invited them all out from the city of London and seated them around a huge hole he’s dug largely for himself. As the experiment is about to commence, however, something utterly astonishing unfolds eight miles down. Framed in a special apparatus, the peerless bit hangs ready for its plunge-yet by “some strange telepathy the old planet seemed to know that an unheard-of liberty was about to be attempted. The exposed surface was like a boiling pot. Great gray bubbles rose and burst with a crackling report. The air spaces and vacuoles below the skin separated and coalesced in an agitated activity. . . . A heavy smell made the air hardly fit for human lungs.”5
