Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Land That Time Forgot Edgar Rice Burroughs

It must have been a little after three o'clock in the afternoon that it happened-the afternoon ofJune 3rd, 1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed through-all those weird and terrifyingexperiences-should have been encompassed within so short a span as three brief months. Rathermight I have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its changes and evolutions for that which I haveseen with my own eyes in this brief interval of time-things that no other mortal eye had seenbefore, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world so long dead that even in the lowestCambrian stratum no trace of it remains. Fused with the melting inner crust, it has passed foreverbeyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket of the earth whither fate has borne me andwhere 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 themanuscript, was approaching the boiling-point. I had come to Greenland for the summer, on theadvice of my physician, and was slowly being bored to extinction, as I had thoughtlessly neglected tobring sufficient reading-matter. Being an indifferent fisherman, my enthusiasm for this form of sportsoon waned; yet in the absence of other forms of recreation I was now risking my life in an entirelyinadequate 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 withGreenland, nothing to do with me; so I shall get through with the one and the other as rapidly aspossible. 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 andfro along the rocky, shattered shore. Bits of surf-harried beach clove the worn granite, or whateverthe rocks of Cape Farewell may be composed of, and as I followed the ebbing tide down one ofthese soft stretches, I saw the thing. Were one to bump into a Bengal tiger in the ravine behind theBimini Baths, one could be no more surprised than was I to see a perfectly good quart thermosbottle turning and twisting in the surf of Cape Farewell at the southern extremity of Greenland. Irescued 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 itscontents. You have read the opening paragraph, and if you are an imaginative idiot like myself, you willwant to read the rest of it; so I shall give it to you here, omitting quotation marks-which aredifficult of remembrance. In two minutes you will forget m