At The Earths Core
contributor: Eric Lease Morgan (Infomotions, Inc.)
creator: Burroughs, Edgar Rice
extent: 274609
format: text/plain
language: en
publisher: Wiretap Electronic Text Archive
rights: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/GPL/2.0/
source: earth.erb
subject: perry
subject: time
subject: mahars
subject: pellucidar
subject: etext
subject: created
subject: judith
subject: boss
subject: burroughs
subject: edgar
subject: rice
subject: earths
subject: core
subject: american
subject: literature
type: text
local mirror: burroughs-at-316.txt
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plain html: burroughs-at-316.htm
sort title: At The Earths Core
full text: [pg/etext94/ecore10.txt] At the Earth's Core, by Edgar Rice Burroughs April, 1994 [Etext #123] This etext was created by Judith Boss, Omaha, Nebraska. The equipment: an IBM-compatible 486/50, a Hewlett-Packard ScanJet IIc flatbed scanner, and Calera Recognition Systems' M/600 Series Professional OCR software and RISC accelerator board donated by Calera Recognition Systems. This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN. 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 which he had brought back with him from the inner world. I came upon him quite suddenly, and no less unexpectedly, upon the rim of the great Sahara Desert. He was standing before a goat-skin tent amidst a clump of date palms within a tiny oasis. Close by was an Arab douar of some eight or …