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 afternoonof June 3rd, 1916. It seems incredible that all that I have passed through-all those weird andterrifying experiences-should have been encompassed within so short a span as three briefmonths. Rather might I have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its changes and evolutions forthat which I have seen with my own eyes in this brief interval of time-things that no othermortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world so long dead thateven in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains. Fused with the melting inner crust, ithas passed forever beyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket of the earth whither fatehas 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 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 thoughtlesslyneglected to bring sufficient reading-matter. Being an indifferent fisherman, my enthusiasm forthis form of sport soon waned; yet in the absence of other forms of recreation I was now riskingmy life in an entirely inadequate boat off Cape Farewell at the southernmost extremity ofGreenland. Greenland! As a descriptive appellation, it is a sorry joke-but my story has nothing to dowith Greenland, nothing to do with me; so I shall get through with the one and the other asrapidly as possible. The inadequate boat finally arrived at a precarious landing, the natives, waist-deep in thesurf, assisting. I was carried ashore, and while the evening meal was being prepared, I wanderedto and fro along the rocky, shattered shore. Bits of surf-harried beach clove the worn granite, orwhatever the rocks of Cape Farewell may be composed of, and as I followed the ebbing tidedown one of these soft stretches, I saw the thing. Were one to bump into a Bengal tiger in theravine behind the Bimini Baths, one could be no more surprised than was I to see a perfectlygood quart thermos bottle turning and twisting in the surf of Cape Farewell at the southernextremity of Greenland. I rescued it, but I was soaked above the knees doing it; and then I satdown in the sand and opened it, and in the long twilight read the manuscript, neatly written andtightly folded, which was its contents.