The People the Time forgot - Edgar Rice Burroughs (chromebook ebook reader .txt) 📗

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Title: The People That Time Forgot
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs


Chapter 1


I am forced to admit that even though I had traveled a long distance
to place Bowen Tyler's manuscript in the hands of his father,
I was still a trifle skeptical as to its sincerity, since I could
not but recall that it had not been many years since Bowen had been
one of the most notorious practical jokers of his alma mater. The
truth was that as I sat in the Tyler library at Santa Monica I
commenced to feel a trifle foolish and to wish that I had merely
forwarded the manuscript by express instead of bearing it personally,
for I confess that I do not enjoy being laughed at. I have a
well-developed sense of humor--when the joke is not on me.

Mr. Tyler, Sr., was expected almost hourly. The last steamer in
from Honolulu had brought information of the date of the expected
sailing of his yacht _Toreador_, which was now twenty-four hours
overdue. Mr. Tyler's assistant secretary, who had been left
at home, assured me that there was no doubt but that the _Toreador_
had sailed as promised, since he knew his employer well enough to
be positive that nothing short of an act of God would prevent his
doing what he had planned to do. I was also aware of the fact
that the sending apparatus of the _Toreador's_ wireless equipment was
sealed, and that it would only be used in event of dire necessity.
There was, therefore, nothing to do but wait, and we waited.

We discussed the manuscript and hazarded guesses concerning it and
the strange events it narrated. The torpedoing of the liner upon
which Bowen J. Tyler, Jr., had taken passage for France to join
the American Ambulance was a well-known fact, and I had further
substantiated by wire to the New York office of the owners, that
a Miss La Rue had been booked for passage. Further, neither she
nor Bowen had been mentioned among the list of survivors; nor had
the body of either of them been recovered.

Their rescue by the English tug was entirely probable; the capture
of the enemy U-33 by the tug's crew was not beyond the range
of possibility; and their adventures during the perilous cruise
which the treachery and deceit of Benson extended until they found
themselves in the waters of the far South Pacific with depleted
stores and poisoned water-casks, while bordering upon the
fantastic, appeared logical enough as narrated, event by event, in
the manuscript.

Caprona has always been considered a more or less mythical land,
though it is vouched for by an eminent navigator of the eighteenth
century; but Bowen's narrative made it seem very real, however many
miles of trackless ocean lay between us and it. Yes, the narrative
had us guessing. We were agreed that it was most improbable; but
neither of us could say that anything which it contained was beyond
the range of possibility. The weird flora and fauna of Caspak were
as possible under the thick, warm atmospheric conditions of the
super-heated crater as they were in the Mesozoic era under almost
exactly similar conditions, which were then probably world-wide.
The assistant secretary had heard of Caproni and his discoveries,
but admitted that he never had taken much stock in the one nor the
other. We were agreed that the one statement most difficult of
explanation was that which reported the entire absence of human
young among the various tribes which Tyler had had intercourse.
This was the one irreconcilable statement of the manuscript. A
world of adults! It was impossible.

We speculated upon the probable fate of Bradley and his party of
English sailors. Tyler had found the graves of two of them; how
many more might have perished! And Miss La Rue--could a young
girl long have survived the horrors of Caspak after having been
separated from all of her own kind? The assistant secretary wondered
if Nobs still was with her, and then we both smiled at this tacit
acceptance of the truth of the whole uncanny tale:

"I suppose I'm a fool," remarked the assistant secretary; "but by
George, I can't help believing it, and I can see that girl now,
with the big Airedale at her side protecting her from the terrors
of a million years ago. I can visualize the entire scene--the apelike
Grimaldi men huddled in their filthy caves; the huge pterodactyls
soaring through the heavy air upon their bat-like wings; the mighty
dinosaurs moving their clumsy hulks beneath the dark shadows of
preglacial forests--the dragons which we considered myths until
science taught us that they were the true recollections of the
first man, handed down through countless ages by word of mouth from
father to son out of the unrecorded dawn of humanity."

"It is stupendous--if true," I replied. "And to think that possibly
they are still there--Tyler and Miss La Rue--surrounded by hideous
dangers, and that possibly Bradley still lives, and some of his
party! I can't help hoping all the time that Bowen and the girl
have found the others; the last Bowen knew of them, there were six
left, all told--the mate Bradley, the engineer Olson, and Wilson,
Whitely, Brady and Sinclair. There might be some hope for them
if they could join forces; but separated, I'm afraid they couldn't
last long."

"If only they hadn't let the German prisoners capture the U-33!
Bowen should have had better judgment than to have trusted them at
all. The chances are von Schoenvorts succeeded in getting safely
back to Kiel and is strutting around with an Iron Cross this very
minute. With a large supply of oil from the wells they discovered
in Caspak, with plenty of water and ample provisions, there is
no reason why they couldn't have negotiated the submerged tunnel
beneath the barrier cliffs and made good their escape."

"I don't like 'em," said the assistant secretary; "but sometimes
you got to hand it to 'em."

"Yes," I growled, "and there's nothing I'd enjoy more than _handing
it to them!_" And then the telephone-bell rang.

The assistant secretary answered, and as I watched him, I saw his
jaw drop and his face go white. "My God!" he exclaimed as he hung
up the receiver as one in a trance. "It can't be!"

"What?" I asked.

"Mr. Tyler is dead," he answered in a dull voice. "He died at sea,
suddenly, yesterday."

The next ten days were occupied in burying Mr. Bowen J. Tyler, Sr.,
and arranging plans for the succor of his son. Mr. Tom Billings,
the late Mr. Tyler's secretary, did it all. He is force, energy,
initiative and good judgment combined and personified. I never
have beheld a more dynamic young man. He handled lawyers, courts
and executors as a sculptor handles his modeling clay. He formed,
fashioned and forced them to his will. He had been a classmate of
Bowen Tyler at college, and a fraternity brother, and before, that
he had been an impoverished and improvident cow-puncher on one of the
great Tyler ranches. Tyler, Sr., had picked him out of thousands
of employees and made him; or rather Tyler had given him the
opportunity, and then Billings had made himself. Tyler, Jr., as
good a judge of men as his father, had taken him into his friendship,
and between the two of them they had turned out a man who would
have died for a Tyler as quickly as he would have for his flag. Yet
there was none of the sycophant or fawner in Billings; ordinarily
I do not wax enthusiastic about men, but this man Billings comes
as close to my conception of what a regular man should be as any
I have ever met. I venture to say that before Bowen J. Tyler sent
him to college he had never heard the word _ethics_, and yet I am
equally sure that in all his life he never has transgressed a single
tenet of the code of ethics of an American gentleman.

Ten days after they brought Mr. Tyler's body off the _Toreador_,
we steamed out into the Pacific in search of Caprona. There were
forty in the party, including the master and crew of the _Toreador_;
and Billings the indomitable was in command. We had a long and
uninteresting search for Caprona, for the old map upon which the
assistant secretary had finally located it was most inaccurate.
When its grim walls finally rose out of the ocean's mists before
us, we were so far south that it was a question as to whether we
were in the South Pacific or the Antarctic. Bergs were numerous,
and it was very cold.

All during the trip Billings had steadfastly evaded questions as
to how we were to enter Caspak after we had found Caprona. Bowen
Tyler's manuscript had made it perfectly evident to all that the
subterranean outlet of the Caspakian River was the only means of
ingress or egress to the crater world beyond the impregnable cliffs.
Tyler's party had been able to navigate this channel because their
craft had been a submarine; but the _Toreador_ could as easily have
flown over the cliffs as sailed under them. Jimmy Hollis and Colin
Short whiled away many an hour inventing schemes for surmounting
the obstacle presented by the barrier cliffs, and making ridiculous
wagers as to which one Tom Billings had in mind; but immediately
we were all assured that we had raised Caprona, Billings called us
together.

"There was no use in talking about these things," he said, "until
we found the island. At best it can be but conjecture on our part
until we have been able to scrutinize the coast closely. Each
of us has formed a mental picture of the Capronian seacoast from
Bowen's manuscript, and it is not likely that any two of these
pictures resemble each other, or that any of them resemble the
coast as we shall presently find it. I have in view three plans
for scaling the cliffs, and the means for carrying out each is in
the hold. There is an electric drill with plenty of waterproof
cable to reach from the ship's dynamos to the cliff-top when the
_Toreador_ is anchored at a safe distance from shore, and there is
sufficient half-inch iron rod to build a ladder from the base to
the top of the cliff. It would be a long, arduous and dangerous
work to bore the holes and insert the rungs of the ladder from the
bottom upward; yet it can be done.

"I also have a life-saving mortar with which we might be able to
throw a line over the summit of the cliffs; but this plan would
necessitate one of us climbing to the top with the chances more
than even that the line would cut at the summit, or the hooks at
the upper end would slip.

"My third plan seems to me the most feasible. You all saw a number
of large, heavy boxes lowered into the hold before we sailed. I
know you did, because you asked me what they contained and commented
upon the large letter '_H_' which was painted upon each box.