The sun was just above the western skyline, and the evening was a particularly bright and clear one, so that the whole extent of the plateau was visible beneath me. It was, as seen from this height, of an oval contour, with a breadth of about thirty miles and a width of twenty. Its general shape was that of a shallow funnel, all the sides sloping down to a considerable lake in the center. This lake may have been ten miles in circumference, and lay very green and beautiful in the evening light, with a thick fringe of reeds at its edges, and with its surface broken by several yellow sandbanks, which gleamed golden in the mellow sunshine. A number of long dark objects, which were too large for alligators and too long for canoes, lay upon the edges of these patches of sand. With my glass I could clearly see that they were alive, but what their nature might be I could not imagine.
From the side of the plateau on which we were, slopes of woodland, with occasional glades, stretched down for five or six miles to the central lake. I could see at my very feet the glade of the iguanodons, and farther off was a round opening in the trees which marked the swamp of the pterodactyls. On the side facing me, however, the plateau presented a very different aspect. There the basalt cliffs of the outside were reproduced upon the inside, forming an escarpment about two hundred feet high, with a woody slope beneath it. Along the base of these red cliffs, some distance above the ground, I could see a number of dark holes through the glass, which I conjectured to be the mouths of caves. At the opening of one of these something white was shimmering, but I was unable to make out what it was. I sat charting the country until the sun had set and it was so dark that I could no longer distinguish details. Then I climbed down to my companions waiting for me so eagerly at the bottom of the great tree. For once I was the hero of the expedition. Alone I had thought of it, and alone I had done it; and here was the chart which would save us a month’s blind groping among unknown dangers. Each of them shook me solemnly by the hand.
But before they discussed the details of my map I had to tell them of my encounter with the ape−man among the branches.
“He has been there all the time,” said I.
“How do you know that?” asked Lord John.
“Because I have never been without that feeling that something malevolent was watching us. I mentioned it to you, Professor Challenger.”
“Our young friend certainly said something of the kind. He is also the one among us who is endowed with that Celtic temperament which would make him sensitive to such impressions.”
“The whole theory of telepathy−−−−” began Summerlee, filling his pipe.
“Is too vast to be now discussed,” said Challenger, with decision. “Tell me, now,” he added, with the air of a bishop addressing a Sunday−school, “did you happen to observe whether the creature could cross its thumb over its palm?”
“No, indeed.”
“Had it a tail?”
“No.”
“Was the foot prehensile?”
“I do not think it could have made off so fast among the branches if it could not get a grip with its feet.”
79
“In South America there are, if my memory serves me−−you will check the observation, Professor Summerlee−−some thirty−six species of monkeys, but the anthropoid ape is unknown. It is clear, however, that he exists in this country, and that he is not the hairy, gorilla−like variety, which is never seen out of Africa or the East.” (I was inclined to interpolate, as I looked at him, that I had seen his first cousin in Kensington.) “This is a whiskered and colorless type, the latter characteristic pointing to the fact that he spends his days in arboreal seclusion. The question which we have to face is whether he approaches more closely to the ape or the man. In the latter case, he may well approximate to what the vulgar have called thèmissing link.’ The solution of this problem is our immediate duty.”