The Poison Belt

Doyle brings back the blustering Professor Challenger for a compact vision of the end of the world. Challenger telegraphs his old companions to gather at his Sussex home and to bring oxygen, having calculated that Earth is drifting into a belt of poison ether that will smother every breathing thing. Sealed inside a single room with their cylinders, the friends watch through the window as the world outside seems to fall still. What follows is less a tale of survival than a meditation on how people face what they take to be certain death, shaded with Doyle’s dry humor and his growing preoccupation with mortality. Short, eerie, and oddly moving, it stands among the earliest modern doomsday stories. Free to read as a PDF and EPUB edition.