Although considered by Malone's editor, Mr McArdle, to be "just a homicidal megalomaniac with a turn for science", his ingenuity can be counted upon to solve any problem or get out of any unsavoury situation, and be sure to offend and insult many people in the process.

He is also seen as extremely vain by his colleagues: Edward Malone says that "he is convinced, of course, that he is destined for Westminster Abbey" (i.e. famous enough to be buried there),[6] and later speculates that "in his fancy, may he see himself sometimes, gracing the vacant pedestal in Trafalgar Square".

On reaching the mouth of the Amazon River in Pará state, the expedition hires local guides and servants Mojo, José, Fernando, Gomez, Manuel and Zambo.

[12] From Manaus the expedition continues up-river to reach an unnamed tributary, which they follow by canoe until by late August the explorers arrive in the Guiana Highlands and the table-top mountain (tepui) that is the Lost World.

[13] The isolated plateau is home to numerous prehistoric animals, previously known only from the fossil record, including pterodactyls, allosaurids, iguanodon and an early species of hominid.

He purchases an estate on Hengist Down near to his Sussex home and engages construction firm Morden & Company to begin sinking a vertical shaft to a depth of eight miles.

In the spring of 1921, American specialist in artesian wells Mr Peerless Jones is engaged to plunge his drilling rod a further hundred feet into the apparently-living protoplasmic substance that was revealed at the bottom of the shaft.

Preparations are ready by Tuesday 21 June 1921, and the drill breaches the tissue, producing a loud scream and unleashing a geyser of a protective tar-like secretion, accompanied by global volcanic activity.

[16] Some months later, Challenger and Malone are the last people to meet the Latvian inventor Theodore Nemor, who claimed to have discovered the physics of disintegrating and then reassembling matter.

Lord John Roxton, Malone, and the Reverend Charles Mason, a former Church of England exorcist who took up Spiritualism, visits a haunted house at Dryfont in Derbyshire.

Challenger joins the investigation ostensibly to demonstrate the fallacies of psychic research but becomes convinced of the reality of intercourse with the spirits of the dead and announces his conversion in a polemic carried by The Spectator magazine.