The Land That Time Forgot | Page 4

The Land that Time Forgot
By Edgar Rice Burroughs


Chapter 1

It must have been a little after three o'clock in the afternoon that it happened--the
afternoon of June 3rd, 1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed through--all
those weird and terrifying experiences--should have been encompassed within so short a
span as three brief months. Rather might I have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its
changes and evolutions for that which I have seen with my own eyes in this brief interval
of time--things that no other mortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a
world dead, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it
remains. Fused with the melting inner crust, it has passed forever beyond the ken of man
other than in that lost pocket of the earth whither fate has borne me and where my doom
is sealed. I am here and here must remain.
After reading this far, my interest, which already had been stimulated by the finding of
the manuscript, was approaching the boiling-point. I had come to Greenland for the
summer, on the advice of my physician, and was slowly being bored to extinction, as I
had thoughtlessly neglected to bring sufficient reading-matter. Being an indifferent
fisherman, my enthusiasm for this form of sport soon waned; yet in the absence of other
forms of recreation I was now risking my life in an entirely inadequate boat off Cape
Farewell at the southernmost extremity of Greenland.
Greenland! As a descriptive appellation, it is a sorry joke--but my story has nothing to do
with Greenland, nothing to do with me; so I shall get through with the one and the other
as rapidly as possible.
The inadequate boat finally arrived at a precarious landing, the natives, waist-deep in the
surf, assisting. I was carried ashore, and while the evening meal was being prepared, I
wandered to and fro along the rocky, shattered shore. Bits of surf-harried beach clove the
worn granite, or whatever the rocks of Cape Farewell may be composed of, and as I
followed the ebbing tide down one of these soft stretches, I saw the thing. Were one to
bump into a Bengal tiger in the ravine behind the Bimini Baths, one could be no more
surprised than was I to see a perfectly good quart thermos bottle turning and twisting in
the surf of Cape Farewell at the southern extremity of Greenland. I rescued it, but I was
soaked above the knees doing it; and then I sat down in the sand and opened it, and in the
long twilight read the manuscript, neatly written and tightly folded, which was its
contents.
You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself,
you will want to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here, omitting quotation
marks--which are difficult of remembrance. In two minutes you will forget me.
My home is in Santa Monica. I am, or was, junior member of my father's firm. We are
ship-builders. Of recent years we have specialized on submarines, which we have built
for Germany, England, France and the United States. I know a sub as a mother knows her
baby's face, and have commanded a score of them on their trial runs. Yet my inclinations
were all toward aviation. I graduated under Curtiss, and after a long siege with my father
obtained his permission to try for the Lafayette Escadrille. As a stepping-stone I obtained
an appointment in the American ambulance service and was on my way to France when

three shrill whistles altered, in as many seconds, my entire scheme of life.
I was sitting on deck with some of the fellows who were going into the American
ambulance service with me, my Airedale, Crown Prince Nobbler, asleep at my feet, when
the first blast of the whistle shattered the peace and security of the ship. Ever since
entering the U-boat zone we had been on the lookout for periscopes, and children that we
were, bemoaning the unkind fate that was to see us safely into France on the morrow
without a glimpse of the dread marauders. We were young; we craved thrills, and God
knows we got them that day; yet by comparison with that through which I have since
passed they were as tame as a Punch-and-Judy show.
I shall never forget the ashy faces of the passengers as they stampeded for their life-belts,
though there was no panic. Nobs rose with a low growl. I rose, also, and over the ship's
side, I saw not two hundred yards distant the periscope of a submarine, while racing
toward the liner the wake of a torpedo was