The Lost World was a part of a series of stories with Professor Challenger as their protagonist. When in 1915, three years after the appearance of the novel, Conan Doyle announced publicly his belief in spiritualism, he sought another possible way of allowing his new-found belief, which would soon turn into a veritable worldwide campaign, to be expressed in fictional form. For a long time he contemplated seriously whether to have Sherlock Holmes convert to spiritualism, but decided against it, since he knew – rationally enough – that this “was a major source of income and therefore not something he should jeopardise or compromise for the sake of spiritualism.” Professor Challenger was incomparably more suited to making spiritualism acceptable and promulgating a message about it. Thus The Land of Mist appeared in 1926, a genuinely long-winded and schematic spiritualist novel, which originally carried the title “The Psychic Adventures of Edward Malone,” and large excerpts of which had already been published in October 1924. In the title Conan Doyle played off of the cloud- and fog-bedecked high plateau of The Lost World, though here he refers to the realm beyond death. Into the place of Darwinism and Social-Darwinism, of evolutionary

biology and paleontology, stepped spiritualism, complete with its new redefinition of science, though photography's indexical ability to convince remained. In the mist it was not dinosaurs who waited, but rather photos of the living dead (Figure 5.1). Yet dinosaurs are also photographically present in the realm of spiritualism, illustrating indeed, as speculated about by more than just a few spiritualist writers, the Earth's own history and that it can be seen once more in the form of photographs. The French astronomer and acknowledged spiritualist Camille Flammarion, whom Conan Doyle met in Paris, suggested there was a cache of photos existing in space, while others postulated a “Biography of the Earth.” According to William Denton in his book Nature's Secrets: