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 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