At the Earth's Core

By Edgar Rice Burroughs


PROLOGUE


IN THE FIRST PLACE PLEASE BEAR IN MIND THAT I do not expect you to
believe this story. Nor could you wonder had you witnessed a recent
experience of mine when, in the armor of blissful and stupendous
ignorance, I gaily narrated the gist of it to a Fellow of the Royal
Geological Society on the occasion of my last trip to London.

You would surely have thought that I had been detected in no less
a heinous crime than the purloining of the Crown Jewels from the
Tower, or putting poison in the coffee of His Majesty the King.

The erudite gentleman in whom I confided congealed before I was half
through!--it is all that saved him from exploding--and my dreams
of an Honorary Fellowship, gold medals, and a niche in the Hall of
Fame faded into the thin, cold air of his arctic atmosphere.

But I believe the story, and so would you, and so would the learned
Fellow of the Royal Geological Society, had you and he heard it
from the lips of the man who told it to me. Had you seen, as I
did, the fire of truth in those gray eyes; had you felt the ring
of sincerity in that quiet voice; had you realized the pathos of it
all--you, too, would believe. You would not have needed the final
ocular proof that I had--the weird rhamphorhynchus-like creature