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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
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.
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