The Greatest Sci-Fi Works of H. G. Wells. H. G. WellsЧитать онлайн книгу.
go to London and see the busy multitudes in Fleet Street and the Strand, and it comes across my mind that they are but the ghosts of the past, haunting the streets that I have seen silent and wretched, going to and fro, phantasms in a dead city, the mockery of life in a galvanised body. And strange, too, it is to stand on Primrose Hill, as I did but a day before writing this last chapter, to see the great province of houses, dim and blue through the haze of the smoke and mist, vanishing at last into the vague lower sky, to see the people walking to and fro among the flower beds on the hill, to see the sightseers about the Martian machine that stands there still, to hear the tumult of playing children, and to recall the time when I saw it all bright and clear-cut, hard and silent, under the dawn of that last great day… .
And strangest of all is it to hold my wife’s hand again, and to think that I have counted her, and that she has counted me, among the dead.
THE END
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU
CHAPTER 1. IN THE DINGHY OF THE LADY VAIN
CHAPTER 2. THE MAN WHO WAS GOING NOWHERE
CHAPTER 4. AT THE SCHOONER’S RAIL
CHAPTER 5. THE LANDING ON THE ISLAND
CHAPTER 6. THE EVIL-LOOKING BOATMEN
CHAPTER 8. THE CRYING OF THE PUMA
CHAPTER 9. THE THING IN THE FOREST
CHAPTER 10. THE CRYING OF THE MAN
CHAPTER 11. THE HUNTING OF THE MAN
CHAPTER 12. THE SAYERS OF THE LAW
CHAPTER 14. DOCTOR MOREAU EXPLAINS
CHAPTER 15. CONCERNING THE BEAST FOLK
CHAPTER 16. HOW THE BEAST FOLK TASTED BLOOD
CHAPTER 18. THE FINDING OF MOREAU
CHAPTER 19. MONTGOMERY’S `BANK HOLIDAY’
CHAPTER 20. ALONE WITH THE BEAST FOLK
CHAPTER 21. THE REVERSION OF THE BEAST FOLK
INTRODUCTION.
ON February the First 1887, the Lady Vain was lost by collision with a derelict when about the latitude 1° S. and longitude 107° W.
On January the Fifth, 1888 — that is eleven months and four days after — my uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, who certainly went aboard the Lady Vain at Callao, and who had been considered drowned, was picked up in latitude 5° 32 S. and longitude 101° W. in a small open boat of which the name was illegible, but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha. He gave such a strange account of himself that he was supposed demented. Subsequently he alleged that his mind was a blank from the moment of his escape from the Lady Vain. His case was discussed among psychologists at the time as a curious instance of the lapse of memory consequent upon physical and mental stress. The following narrative was found among his papers by the undersigned, his nephew and heir, but unaccompanied by any definite request for publication.
The only island known to exist in the region in which my uncle was picked up is Noble’s Isle, a small volcanic islet and uninhabited. It was visited in 1891 by H. M. S. Scorpion. A party of sailors then landed, but found nothing living thereon except certain curious white moths, some hogs and rabbits, and some rather peculiar rats. So that this narrative is without confirmation in its most essential particular. With that understood, there seems no harm in putting this strange story before the public in accordance, as I believe, with my uncle’s intentions. There is at least this much in its behalf: my uncle passed out of human knowledge about latitude 5° S. and longitude 105° E., and reappeared in the same part of the ocean after a space of eleven months. In some way he must have lived during the interval. And it seems that a schooner called the Ipecacuanha with a drunken captain, John Davies, did start from Africa with a puma and certain other animals aboard in January, 1887, that the vessel was well known at several ports in the South Pacific, and that it finally disappeared from those seas (with a considerable amount of copra aboard), sailing to its unknown fate from Bayna in December, 1887, a date that tallies entirely with my uncle’s story.
CHARLES EDWARD PRENDICK.
(The Story written by Edward Prendick)
CHAPTER 1
IN THE DINGHY OF THE LADY VAIN
I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the Lady Vain. As everyone knows, she collided with a derelict when ten days out from Callao. The long-boat with seven of the crew was picked up eighteen days after by H.M. gunboat Myrtle, and the story of their privations has become almost as well known as the far more terrible Medusa case. I have now, however, to add to the published story of the Lady Vain another as horrible, and certainly far stranger. It has hitherto been supposed that the four men who were in the dinghy perished, but this is incorrect. I have the best evidence for this assertion — I am one of the four men.
But, in the first place, I must state that there never were four men in the dinghy; the number was three. Constans, who was `seen by the captain to jump into the gig’ (Daily News, March 17, 1887), luckily for us, and unluckily for himself, did not reach us. He came down out of the tangle of ropes under the stays of the smashed bowsprit; some small rope caught