The Land That Time Forgot

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 distinctly visible.  We were aboard an American ship—­which, of course, was not armed.  We were entirely defenseless; yet without warning, we were being torpedoed.

I stood rigid, spellbound, watching the white wake of the torpedo.  It struck us on the starboard side almost amidships.  The vessel rocked as though the sea beneath it had been uptorn by a mighty volcano.  We were thrown to the decks, bruised and stunned, and then above the ship, carrying with it fragments of steel and wood and dismembered human bodies, rose a column of water hundreds of feet into the air.

The silence which followed the detonation of the exploding torpedo was almost equally horrifying.  It lasted for perhaps two seconds, to be followed by the screams and moans of the wounded, the cursing of the men and the hoarse commands of the ship’s officers.  They were splendid—­they and their crew.  Never before had I been so proud of my nationality as I was that moment.  In all the chaos which followed the torpedoing of the liner no officer or member of the crew lost his head or showed in the slightest any degree of panic or fear.

While we were attempting to lower boats, the submarine emerged and trained guns on us.  The officer in command ordered us to lower our flag, but this the captain of the liner refused to do.  The ship was listing frightfully to starboard, rendering the port boats useless, while half the starboard boats had been demolished by the explosion.  Even while the passengers were crowding the starboard rail and scrambling into the few boats left to us, the submarine commenced shelling the ship.  I saw one shell burst in a group of women and children, and then I turned my head and covered my eyes.

When I looked again to horror was added chagrin, for with the emerging of the U-boat I had recognized her as a product of our own shipyard.  I knew her to a rivet.  I had superintended her construction.  I had sat in that very conning-tower and directed the efforts of the sweating crew below when first her prow clove the sunny summer waters of the Pacific; and now this creature of my brain and hand had turned Frankenstein, bent upon pursuing me to my death.

A second shell exploded upon the deck.  One of the lifeboats, frightfully overcrowded, swung at a dangerous angle from its davits.  A fragment of the shell shattered the bow tackle, and I saw the women and children and the men vomited into the sea beneath, while the boat dangled stern up for a moment from its single davit, and at last with increasing momentum dived into the midst of the struggling victims screaming upon the face of the waters.

Now I saw men spring to the rail and leap into the ocean.  The deck was tilting to an impossible angle.  Nobs braced himself with all four feet to keep from slipping into the scuppers and looked up into my face with a questioning whine.  I stooped and stroked his head.

“Come on, boy!” I cried, and running to the side of the ship, dived headforemost over the rail.  When I came up, the first thing I saw was Nobs swimming about in a bewildered sort of way a few yards from me.  At sight of me his ears went flat, and his lips parted in a characteristic grin.

The submarine was withdrawing toward the north, but all the time it was shelling the open boats, three of them, loaded to the gunwales with survivors.  Fortunately the small boats presented a rather poor target, which, combined with the bad marksmanship of the Germans preserved their occupants from harm; and after a few minutes a blotch of smoke appeared upon the eastern horizon and the U-boat submerged and disappeared.

All the time the lifeboats has been pulling away from the danger of the sinking liner, and now, though I yelled at the top of my lungs, they either did not hear my appeals for help or else did not dare return to succor me.  Nobs and I had gained some little distance from the ship when it rolled completely over and sank.  We were caught in the suction only enough to be drawn backward a few yards, neither of us being carried beneath the surface.  I glanced hurriedly about for something to which to cling.  My eyes were directed toward the point at which the liner had disappeared when there came from the depths of the ocean the muffled reverberation of an explosion, and almost simultaneously a geyser of water in which were shattered lifeboats, human bodies, steam, coal, oil, and the flotsam of a liner’s deck leaped high above the surface of the sea—­a watery column momentarily marking the grave of another ship in this greatest cemetery of the seas.

When the turbulent waters had somewhat subsided and the sea had ceased to spew up wreckage, I ventured to swim back in search of something substantial enough to support my weight and that of Nobs as well.  I had gotten well over the area of the wreck when not a half-dozen yards ahead of me a lifeboat shot bow foremost out of the ocean almost its entire length to flop down upon its keel with a mighty splash.  It must have been carried far below, held to its mother ship by a single rope which finally parted to the enormous strain put upon it.  In no other way can I account for its having leaped so far out of the water—­a beneficent circumstance to which I doubtless owe my life, and that of another far dearer to me than my own.  I say beneficent circumstance even in the face of the fact that a fate far more hideous confronts us than that which we escaped that day; for because of that circumstance I have met her whom otherwise I never should have known; I have met and loved her.  At least I have had that great happiness in life; nor can Caspak, with all her horrors, expunge that which has been.

So for the thousandth time I thank the strange fate which sent that lifeboat hurtling upward from the green pit of destruction to which it had been dragged—­sent it far up above the surface, emptying its water as it rose above the waves, and dropping it upon the surface of the sea, buoyant and safe.

It did not take me long to clamber over its side and drag Nobs in to comparative safety, and then I glanced around upon the scene of death and desolation which surrounded us.  The sea was littered with wreckage among which floated the pitiful forms of women and children, buoyed up by their useless lifebelts.  Some were torn and mangled; others lay rolling quietly to the motion of the sea, their countenances composed and peaceful; others were set in hideous lines of agony or horror.  Close to the boat’s side floated the figure of a girl.  Her face was turned upward, held above the surface by her life-belt, and was framed in a floating mass of dark and waving hair.  She was very beautiful.  I had never looked upon such perfect features, such a divine molding which was at the same time human—­ intensely human.  It was a face filled with character and strength and femininity—­the face of one who was created to love and to be loved.  The cheeks were flushed to the hue of life and health and vitality, and yet she lay there upon the bosom of the sea, dead.  I felt something rise in my throat as I looked down upon that radiant vision, and I swore that I should live to avenge her murder.

And then I let my eyes drop once more to the face upon the water, and what I saw nearly tumbled me backward into the sea, for the eyes in the dead face had opened; the lips had parted; and one hand was raised toward me in a mute appeal for succor.  She lived!  She was not dead!  I leaned over the boat’s side and drew her quickly in to the comparative safety which God had given me.  I removed her life-belt and my soggy coat and made a pillow for her head.  I chafed her hands and arms and feet.  I worked over her for an hour, and at last I was rewarded by a deep sigh, and again those great eyes opened and looked into mine.

At that I was all embarrassment.  I have never been a ladies’ man; at Leland-Stanford I was the butt of the class because of my hopeless imbecility in the presence of a pretty girl; but the men liked me, nevertheless.  I was rubbing one of her hands when she opened her eyes, and I dropped it as though it were a red-hot rivet.  Those eyes took me in slowly from head to foot; then they wandered slowly around the horizon marked by the rising and falling gunwales of the lifeboat.  They looked at Nobs and softened, and then came back to me filled with questioning.

“I—­I—­” I stammered, moving away and stumbling over the next thwart.  The vision smiled wanly.

“Aye-aye, sir!” she replied faintly, and again her lips drooped, and her long lashes swept the firm, fair texture of her skin.

“I hope that you are feeling better,” I finally managed to say.

“Do you know,” she said after a moment of silence, “I have been awake for a long time!  But I did not dare open my eyes.  I thought I must be dead, and I was afraid to look, for fear that I should see nothing but blackness about me.  I am afraid to die!  Tell me what happened after the ship went down.  I remember all that happened before—­oh, but I wish that I might forget it!” A sob broke her voice.  “The beasts!” she went on after a moment.  “And to think that I was to have married one of them—­a lieutenant in the German navy.”

Presently she resumed as though she had not ceased speaking.  “I went down and down and down.  I thought I should never cease to sink.  I felt no particular distress until I suddenly started upward at ever-increasing velocity; then my lungs seemed about to burst, and I must have lost consciousness, for I remember nothing more until I opened my eyes after listening to a torrent of invective against Germany and Germans.  Tell me, please, all that happened after the ship sank.”

I told her, then, as well as I could, all that I had seen—­the submarine shelling the open boats and all the rest of it.  She thought it marvelous that we should have been spared in so providential a manner, and I had a pretty speech upon my tongue’s end, but lacked the nerve to deliver it.  Nobs had come over and nosed his muzzle into her lap, and she stroked his ugly face, and at last she leaned over and put her cheek against his forehead.  I have always admired Nobs; but this was the first time that it had ever occurred to me that I might wish to be Nobs.  I wondered how he would take it, for he is as unused to women as I. But he took to it as a duck takes to water.  What I lack of being a ladies’ man, Nobs certainly makes up for as a ladies’ dog.  The old scalawag just closed his eyes and put on one of the softest “sugar-wouldn’t-melt-in-my-mouth” expressions you ever saw and stood there taking it and asking for more.  It made me jealous.

“You seem fond of dogs,” I said.

“I am fond of this dog,” she replied.

Whether she meant anything personal in that reply I did not know; but I took it as personal and it made me feel mighty good.

As we drifted about upon that vast expanse of loneliness it is not strange that we should quickly become well acquainted.  Constantly we scanned the horizon for signs of smoke, venturing guesses as to our chances of rescue; but darkness settled, and the black night enveloped us without ever the sight of a speck upon the waters.

We were thirsty, hungry, uncomfortable, and cold.  Our wet garments had dried but little and I knew that the girl must be in grave danger from the exposure to a night of cold and wet upon the water in an open boat, without sufficient clothing and no food.  I had managed to bail all the water out of the boat with cupped hands, ending by mopping the balance up with my handkerchief—­a slow and back-breaking procedure; thus I had made a comparatively dry place for the girl to lie down low in the bottom of the boat, where the sides would protect her from the night wind, and when at last she did so, almost overcome as she was by weakness and fatigue, I threw my wet coat over her further to thwart the chill.  But it was of no avail; as I sat watching her, the moonlight marking out the graceful curves of her slender young body, I saw her shiver.

“Isn’t there something I can do?” I asked.  “You can’t lie there chilled through all night.  Can’t you suggest something?”

She shook her head.  “We must grin and bear it,” she replied after a moment.

Nobbler came and lay down on the thwart beside me, his back against my leg, and I sat staring in dumb misery at the girl, knowing in my heart of hearts that she might die before morning came, for what with the shock and exposure, she had already gone through enough to kill almost any woman.  And as I gazed down at her, so small and delicate and helpless, there was born slowly within my breast a new emotion.  It had never been there before; now it will never cease to be there.  It made me almost frantic in my desire to find some way to keep warm and cooling lifeblood in her veins.  I was cold myself, though I had almost forgotten it until Nobbler moved and I felt a new sensation of cold along my leg against which he had lain, and suddenly realized that in that one spot I had been warm.  Like a great light came the understanding of a means to warm the girl.  Immediately I knelt beside her to put my scheme into practice when suddenly I was overwhelmed with embarrassment.  Would she permit it, even if I could muster the courage to suggest it?  Then I saw her frame convulse, shudderingly, her muscles reacting to her rapidly lowering temperature, and casting prudery to the winds, I threw myself down beside her and took her in my arms, pressing her body close to mine.

She drew away suddenly, voicing a little cry of fright, and tried to push me from her.

“Forgive me,” I managed to stammer.  “It is the only way.  You will die of exposure if you are not warmed, and Nobs and I are the only means we can command for furnishing warmth.”  And I held her tightly while I called Nobs and bade him lie down at her back.  The girl didn’t struggle any more when she learned my purpose; but she gave two or three little gasps, and then began to cry softly, burying her face on my arm, and thus she fell asleep.