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
