Professor Challenger

Professor Challenger imperiously summons his three best friends to come this country house, each one to bring a cylinder of pure oxygen. When they arrive, the reason for this strange request becomes terrifying clear. Professor Challenger has become convinced that the earth is entering a poison belt of ether and that life upon this planet is doomed.

Three years after the events that took place in "The Lost World", Professor Challenger urgently summons his fellow explorers to a meeting. Oddly, he requires each to bring an oxygen cylinder with him. What he soon informs them is that from astronomical data and just received telegraphs of strange accidents on the other side of the world, he has deduced that the Earth is starting to move through a region of space containing something poisonous to humankind.

The sequel to The Lost World, Arthur Conan Doyle's Poison Belt reunites the ever-popular Professor Challenger, intrepid journalist Edward Malone, dashing Lord John Roxton and the querulous Professor Summerlee for yet another adventure. When a sinister poison envelops the earth, the entire human race teeters on the brink of destruction, forcing the comrades to implement a desperate plan for survival.

'You will conceive a bunch of grapes,' said he, 'which are covered by some infinitesimal but noxious bacillus. The gardener passes it through a disinfecting medium. It may be that he desires his grapes to be cleaner. It may be that he needs space to breed some fresh bacillus less noxious than the last.'

"The Poison Belt" is a science fiction novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Professor Challenger sends telegrams requesting three friends to join him at his home and asks each of them to 'bring oxygen'. They are led into a sealed room, along with Challenger and his wife. During his studies into a variety of phenomena, Challenger has calculated that the Earth is moving into a belt of toxic ether which he believes will suffocate humankind, but not before complete chaos erupts on Earth.

"Nothing could be done. The thing was universal and beyond our human knowledge or control. It was death for young and old, for weak and strong, for rich and poor, without hope or possibility of escape." Must Professor George Challenger and friends, barricaded in a room, see Earth die? As globe passes through a belt of poisonous ether, terror sweeps mankind; cities riot; communications cease. Novella.

The Land of Mist is a novel written by Arthur Conan Doyle in 1926. Although this is a Professor Challenger story, it centres more on his daughter Enid and her colleague. Heavily influenced by Doyle’s growing belief in Spiritualism after the death of his son, brother, and two nephews in World War I, the book focuses on Edward Malone’s at first professional, and later personal interest in Spiritualism.