LIPPINCOTT’S
MONTHLY MAGAZINE. JULY,189T
A MOUNTAIN MOLOCH. PROLOGUE.
WONDER how soon the time will come when the world shall be so thoroughly explored and its peoples so cosmopolitanized that
adventure and discover will be things of the past. A few days since I should have said that t is undesirable yet inevitable epoch was already present with us; that the field of real romance was even now synony mous with the field of professed fiction. No more Odysseys; no Circe ; no Lotos-eaters; no more travels of Sir John Mandeville ; no Prester Johns, with their mysterious courts. Even the wanderings of Captain Cook had begun to read like the works of the modern story-tellers whose very inventions bade fair soon to reach a limit, and then the world would have nothing to do but settle down to the dead level of stud ing humdrum facts and pursuing material improvements. §rom this well-nigh morbid condition I have been suddenly rescued, and in a way that brings most forcibly to my mind how much may be hidden under little. Who would imagine that a tale almost as wildly improbable as the wildest fictions of Verne and Haggard had lain for
decades concealed under the formal phraseology of a dust-covered report in the naval archives at Washington, and that the key to its secret was in the memory of but one man, who has but lately gone forth to explore that country which alone must remain undiscoverable to the eye and mysterious to the prying intellect of flesh-encumbered humanity? I had been spending a few days in Washington, and, being invited
to dine one evening by an oflicial of the Navy Department, I strolled around to his oflice late in the afternoon.
wits’ end.
I found him almost at his
One of the annoying incidents of oflicial life had just oc
curred. The Secretary of the Navy had sent for a certain document, and it could not be found. Clerks scurried hither and thither, or stood around in awed and expectant silence. As I entered, my friend came
forward. 3
