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The People That Time Forgot

E >> Edgar Rice Burroughs >> The People That Time Forgot



The People That Time Forgot

by Edgar Rice Burroughs





Chapter I

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. These boxes contain the various parts
of a hydro-aeroplane. I purpose assembling this upon the strip
of beach described in Bowen's manuscript--the beach where he
found the dead body of the apelike man--provided there is
sufficient space above high water; otherwise we shall have to
assemble it on deck and lower it over the side. After it is
assembled, I shall carry tackle and ropes to the cliff-top, and
then it will be comparatively simple to hoist the search-party
and its supplies in safety. Or I can make a sufficient number
of trips to land the entire party in the valley beyond the
barrier; all will depend, of course, upon what my first
reconnaissance reveals."

That afternoon we steamed slowly along the face of Caprona's
towering barrier.

"You see now," remarked Billings as we craned our necks to scan
the summit thousands of feet above us, "how futile it would
have been to waste our time in working out details of a plan to
surmount those." And he jerked his thumb toward the cliffs.
"It would take weeks, possibly months, to construct a ladder
to the top. I had no conception of their formidable height.
Our mortar would not carry a line halfway to the crest of the
lowest point. There is no use discussing any plan other than
the hydro-aeroplane. We'll find the beach and get busy."

Late the following morning the lookout announced that he could
discern surf about a mile ahead; and as we approached, we all
saw the line of breakers broken by a long sweep of rolling surf
upon a narrow beach. The launch was lowered, and five of us
made a landing, getting a good ducking in the ice-cold waters
in the doing of it; but we were rewarded by the finding of the
clean-picked bones of what might have been the skeleton of a
high order of ape or a very low order of man, lying close to
the base of the cliff. Billings was satisfied, as were the
rest of us, that this was the beach mentioned by Bowen, and we
further found that there was ample room to assemble the
sea-plane.

Billings, having arrived at a decision, lost no time in acting,
with the result that before mid-afternoon we had landed all the
large boxes marked "H" upon the beach, and were busily
engaged in opening them. Two days later the plane was
assembled and tuned. We loaded tackles and ropes, water, food
and ammunition in it, and then we each implored Billings to let
us be the one to accompany him. But he would take no one.
That was Billings; if there was any especially difficult or
dangerous work to be done, that one man could do, Billings
always did it himself. If he needed assistance, he never
called for volunteers--just selected the man or men he
considered best qualified for the duty. He said that he
considered the principles underlying all volunteer service
fundamentally wrong, and that it seemed to him that calling
for volunteers reflected upon the courage and loyalty of the
entire command.

We rolled the plane down to the water's edge, and Billings
mounted the pilot's seat. There was a moment's delay as he
assured himself that he had everything necessary. Jimmy Hollis
went over his armament and ammunition to see that nothing had
been omitted. Besides pistol and rifle, there was the
machine-gun mounted in front of him on the plane, and
ammunition for all three. Bowen's account of the terrors of
Caspak had impressed us all with the necessity for proper means
of defense.

At last all was ready. The motor was started, and we pushed
the plane out into the surf. A moment later, and she was
skimming seaward. Gently she rose from the surface of the
water, executed a wide spiral as she mounted rapidly,
circled once far above us and then disappeared over the crest
of the cliffs. We all stood silent and expectant, our eyes
glued upon the towering summit above us. Hollis, who was now
in command, consulted his wrist-watch at frequent intervals.

"Gad," exclaimed Short, "we ought to be hearing from him pretty soon!"

Hollis laughed nervously. "He's been gone only ten minutes,"
he announced.

"Seems like an hour," snapped Short. "What's that? Did you
hear that? He's firing! It's the machine-gun! Oh, Lord; and
here we are as helpless as a lot of old ladies ten thousand
miles away! We can't do a thing. We don't know what's happening.
Why didn't he let one of us go with him?"

Yes, it was the machine-gun. We would hear it distinctly for
at least a minute. Then came silence. That was two weeks ago.
We have had no sign nor signal from Tom Billings since.



Chapter 2

I'll never forget my first impressions of Caspak as I circled
in, high over the surrounding cliffs. From the plane I looked
down through a mist upon the blurred landscape beneath me.
The hot, humid atmosphere of Caspak condenses as it is fanned
by the cold Antarctic air-currents which sweep across the
crater's top, sending a tenuous ribbon of vapor far out across
the Pacific. Through this the picture gave one the suggestion
of a colossal impressionistic canvas in greens and browns and
scarlets and yellows surrounding the deep blue of the inland
sea--just blobs of color taking form through the tumbling mist.

I dived close to the cliffs and skirted them for several miles
without finding the least indication of a suitable landing-place;
and then I swung back at a lower level, looking for a clearing
close to the bottom of the mighty escarpment; but I could find
none of sufficient area to insure safety. I was flying pretty
low by this time, not only looking for landing places but watching
the myriad life beneath me. I was down pretty well toward the
south end of the island, where an arm of the lake reaches far
inland, and I could see the surface of the water literally
black with creatures of some sort. I was too far up to recognize
individuals, but the general impression was of a vast army of
amphibious monsters. The land was almost equally alive with
crawling, leaping, running, flying things. It was one of the
latter which nearly did for me while my attention was fixed
upon the weird scene below.

The first intimation I had of it was the sudden blotting out of
the sunlight from above, and as I glanced quickly up, I saw a
most terrific creature swooping down upon me. It must have
been fully eighty feet long from the end of its long, hideous
beak to the tip of its thick, short tail, with an equal spread
of wings. It was coming straight for me and hissing frightfully--
I could hear it above the whir of the propeller. It was coming
straight down toward the muzzle of the machine-gun and I let it
have it right in the breast; but still it came for me, so that
I had to dive and turn, though I was dangerously close to earth.

The thing didn't miss me by a dozen feet, and when I rose, it
wheeled and followed me, but only to the cooler air close to
the level of the cliff-tops; there it turned again and dropped.
Something--man's natural love of battle and the chase, I presume--
impelled me to pursue it, and so I too circled and dived.
The moment I came down into the warm atmosphere of Caspak, the
creature came for me again, rising above me so that it might
swoop down upon me. Nothing could better have suited my armament,
since my machine-gun was pointed upward at an angle of about degrees
and could not be either depressed or elevated by the pilot.
If I had brought someone along with me, we could have raked the
great reptile from almost any position, but as the creature's
mode of attack was always from above, he always found me ready
with a hail of bullets. The battle must have lasted a minute
or more before the thing suddenly turned completely over in the
air and fell to the ground.

Bowen and I roomed together at college, and I learned a lot
from him outside my regular course. He was a pretty good
scholar despite his love of fun, and his particular hobby
was paleontology. He used to tell me about the various forms
of animal and vegetable life which had covered the globe during
former eras, and so I was pretty well acquainted with the
fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals of paleolithic times.
I knew that the thing that had attacked me was some sort of
pterodactyl which should have been extinct millions of years ago.
It was all that I needed to realize that Bowen had exaggerated
nothing in his manuscript.

Having disposed of my first foe, I set myself once more to
search for a landing-place near to the base of the cliffs
beyond which my party awaited me. I knew how anxious they
would be for word from me, and I was equally anxious to relieve
their minds and also to get them and our supplies well within
Caspak, so that we might set off about our business of finding
and rescuing Bowen Tyler; but the pterodactyl's carcass had
scarcely fallen before I was surrounded by at least a dozen of
the hideous things, some large, some small, but all bent upon
my destruction. I could not cope with them all, and so I rose
rapidly from among them to the cooler strata wherein they dared
not follow; and then I recalled that Bowen's narrative
distinctly indicated that the farther north one traveled in
Caspak, the fewer were the terrible reptiles which rendered
human life impossible at the southern end of the island.

There seemed nothing now but to search out a more northerly
landing-place and then return to the Toreador and transport
my companions, two by two, over the cliffs and deposit them at
the rendezvous. As I flew north, the temptation to explore
overcame me. I knew that I could easily cover Caspak and
return to the beach with less petrol than I had in my tanks;
and there was the hope, too, that I might find Bowen or some of
his party. The broad expanse of the inland sea lured me out
over its waters, and as I crossed, I saw at either extremity of
the great body of water an island--one to the south and one to
the north; but I did not alter my course to examine either
closely, leaving that to a later time.

The further shore of the sea revealed a much narrower strip of
land between the cliffs and the water than upon the western
side; but it was a hillier and more open country. There were
splendid landing-places, and in the distance, toward the north,
I thought I descried a village; but of that I was not positive.
However, as I approached the land, I saw a number of human figures
apparently pursuing one who fled across a broad expanse of meadow.
As I dropped lower to have a better look at these people, they
caught the whirring of my propellers and looked aloft. They paused
an instant--pursuers and pursued; and then they broke and raced
for the shelter of the nearest wood. Almost instantaneously a
huge bulk swooped down upon me, and as I looked up, I realized
that there were flying reptiles even in this part of Caspak.
The creature dived for my right wing so quickly that nothing but
a sheer drop could have saved me. I was already close to the
ground, so that my maneuver was extremely dangerous; but I was
in a fair way of making it successfully when I saw that I was
too closely approaching a large tree. My effort to dodge the
tree and the pterodactyl at the same time resulted disastrously.
One wing touched an upper branch; the plane tipped and swung
around, and then, out of control, dashed into the branches of
the tree, where it came to rest, battered and torn, forty feet
above the ground.

Hissing loudly, the huge reptile swept close above the tree in
which my plane had lodged, circled twice over me and then
flapped away toward the south. As I guessed then and was to
learn later, forests are the surest sanctuary from these
hideous creatures, which, with their enormous spread of wing
and their great weight, are as much out of place among trees
as is a seaplane.

For a minute or so I clung there to my battered flyer, now
useless beyond redemption, my brain numbed by the frightful
catastrophe that had befallen me. All my plans for the succor
of Bowen and Miss La Rue had depended upon this craft, and in a
few brief minutes my own selfish love of adventure had wrecked
their hopes and mine. And what effect it might have upon the
future of the balance of the rescuing expedition I could not
even guess. Their lives, too, might be sacrificed to my
suicidal foolishness. That I was doomed seemed inevitable; but
I can honestly say that the fate of my friends concerned me
more greatly than did my own.

Beyond the barrier cliffs my party was even now nervously
awaiting my return. Presently apprehension and fear would
claim them--and they would never know! They would attempt to
scale the cliffs--of that I was sure; but I was not so positive
that they would succeed; and after a while they would turn
back, what there were left of them, and go sadly and mournfully
upon their return journey to home. Home! I set my jaws and
tried to forget the word, for I knew that I should never again
see home.

And what of Bowen and his girl? I had doomed them too. They would
never even know that an attempt had been made to rescue them.
If they still lived, they might some day come upon the ruined
remnants of this great plane hanging in its lofty sepulcher and
hazard vain guesses and be filled with wonder; but they would
never know; and I could not but be glad that they would not
know that Tom Billings had sealed their death-warrants by his
criminal selfishness.

All these useless regrets were getting me in a bad way; but at
last I shook myself and tried to put such things out of my mind
and take hold of conditions as they existed and do my level
best to wrest victory from defeat. I was badly shaken up and
bruised, but considered myself mighty lucky to escape with my life.
The plane hung at a precarious angle, so that it was with
difficulty and considerable danger that I climbed from it into
the tree and then to the ground.

My predicament was grave. Between me and my friends lay an
inland sea fully sixty miles wide at this point and an
estimated land-distance of some three hundred miles around the
northern end of the sea, through such hideous dangers as I am
perfectly free to admit had me pretty well buffaloed. I had
seen quite enough of Caspak this day to assure me that Bowen
had in no way exaggerated its perils. As a matter of fact, I
am inclined to believe that he had become so accustomed to them
before he started upon his manuscript that he rather slighted them.
As I stood there beneath that tree--a tree which should have been
part of a coal-bed countless ages since--and looked out across
a sea teeming with frightful life--life which should have been
fossil before God conceived of Adam--I would not have given a
minim of stale beer for my chances of ever seeing my friends or
the outside world again; yet then and there I swore to fight my
way as far through this hideous land as circumstances would permit.
I had plenty of ammunition, an automatic pistol and a heavy rifle--
the latter one of twenty added to our equipment on the strength of
Bowen's description of the huge beasts of prey which ravaged Caspak.
My greatest danger lay in the hideous reptilia whose low nervous
organizations permitted their carnivorous instincts to function
for several minutes after they had ceased to live.

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