The Land that Time Forgot (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Edgar Rice Burroughs, Darren Harris - Fain and Darren Harris-Fain

While best known as the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote dozens of action-packed science-fiction novels. Perhaps his most acclaimed novel, The Land That Time Forgot takes readers from World War I naval battles to a mysterious island filled with ferocious prehistoric beasts and savage subhumans. While Burroughss explanations for these strange phenomena are wildly fantastic, the focus is on survival, and as in most of his fiction, threats posed by nature and by dangerous foes test modern civilization. The result is a page-turning adventure with a scientific mystery at its core, a set of linked stories where, in the midst of fighting one danger after another, men become heroes and find love along the way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411431102

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950) is the creator of Tarzan, one of the most popular fictional characters of all time, and John Carter, hero of the Barsoom science fiction series. Burroughs was a prolific author, writing almost 70 books before his death in 1950, and was one of the first authors to popularize a character across multiple media, as he did with Tarzan’s appearance in comic strips, movies, and merchandise. Residing in Hawaii at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, Burroughs was drawn into the Second World War and became one of the oldest war correspondents at the time. Edgar Rice Burroughs’s popularity continues to be memorialized through the community of Tarzana, California, which is named after the ranch he owned in the area, and through the Burrough crater on Mars, which was named in his honour.

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INTRODUCTION

WHILE best known as the creator of Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote dozens of action-packed science-fiction novels. Perhaps his most acclaimed novel, The Land That Time Forgot takes readers from World War I naval battles to a mysterious island filled with ferocious prehistoric beasts and savage subhumans ranged along the evolutionary ladder. While Burroughs’ explanations for these strange phenomena are wildly fantastic, the focus is on survival, and as in most of his fiction, modern civilization is tested by the threats posed by nature and by dangerous foes. The result is a page-turning adventure with a scientific mystery at its core, a set of linked stories where, in the midst of fighting one danger after another, men become heroes and find love along the way.

Despite his popular tales of heroism and romance, Edgar Rice Burroughs had the kind of life that inspired the fantasies he eventually published to wild acclaim. Born in 1875 in Chicago, he aspired to a military career but failed the entrance examination to West Point. Drawn to the West, he briefly served in the cavalry in Arizona, then drifted from place to place, pursuing one unsuccessful and unappealing business venture after another and also working briefly as a railroad policeman, a construction worker, a salesman, and an accountant. During these years of wandering and searching, he married in 1900, and by 1909 he and his wife had two children. To escape the drudgery of dead-end jobs and an increasingly unhappy marriage, he fled into the exciting world of pulp magazines, with their stories of action and adventure, valiant heroes and impossibly lovely ladies. However, none of these stories could match his own imaginative fantasies, and in the early 1910s, while trying to sell pencil sharpeners, he determined he could do better and saw writing as a possible means toward the riches he longed for. As he famously said about his initial motivation for writing, I had a wife and two babies. In 1911, at age thirty-six, he sold his first story, A Princess of Mars, which began his popular Barsoom series about the exploits of John Carter on the red planet, and the following year the magazine All-Story published the first installment of Tarzan of the Apes, which appeared as a book in 1914. Tarzan became one of a handful of literary characters known around the world, and Burroughs’ success was assured. In addition to writing about Tarzan and other equally fantastic characters, Burroughs oversaw adaptations of his most popular character in movies and comic strips and books. He was the first American writer to incorporate himself, and his estate in California, named Tarzana, eventually expanded to become a city. As a war correspondent during World War II, he witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor. When he died in 1950, he was one of the most commercially successful and critically scorned authors in America.

The same aspects of Burroughs’ fiction that his fans adored were why others deplored his popularity. In works by Burroughs, plot is everything; ideas, style, and characterization are secondary concerns. Moreover, Burroughs’ plots in his most popular novels and series rely heavily on science-fiction elements, which are typically explained away casually: John Carter travels to Mars simply by thinking himself there; without human instruction, Tarzan learns English by looking at books, and of course he learns the language of the apes that raise him; evolution has come to a standstill in The Land That Time Forgot because of the island’s isolation and its fauna’s unusual evolutionary history. As science-fiction historian E. F. Bleiler has said, Burroughs is a science fiction writer in externals only, not in inner essence. Also, Burroughs’ plots often hinge upon coincidence, and over time he tended to repeat himself. Yet his many readers found in Burroughs exactly what they wanted, which was precisely what he aimed to give them: escapist entertainment, exciting fantasies, as Bleiler put it, of eroticism and power, with no pretence to literary merit or intellectual significance. While the gatekeepers of literature looked down on his work and lamented his success, Burroughs managed to keep his readers coming back for more, partly because his stories were so exciting to read, even if they required a healthy suspension of disbelief and a high tolerance for flat characters and flatter dialogue.

Despite his limitations, The Land That Time Forgot stands out among Burroughs’ many books for both Burroughs’ skill as a storyteller and for the novel’s imaginative if implausible premise. The book was initially published in three parts: The Land That Time Forgot in August 1918, The People That Time Forgot in October 1918, and Out of Time’s Abyss in December 1918, all in Blue Book Magazine. The editor of Blue Book, Ray Long, changed the title of the first installment from Burroughs’ initial one, The Lost U-Boat, and also changed the second, which was Cor-Sva-Jo; thus Long is responsible for the title of the book, which brought the three installments together for the first time in 1924.

Because each installment was published as a separate novella, some view The Land That Time Forgot as a collection of linked novellas rather than as a novel. Others contend that since the book involves the same small set of characters in the same setting, it is indeed a novel. Complicating matters further is the fact that the book’s three parts have also been published separately in paperback, suggesting that the work is actually a trilogy. In any event, the three parts are clearly intended to be read together, in part because of the skillful way in which Burroughs structures the story and gradually reveals its mysteries.

The story begins with an unnamed narrator, whom some commentators believe is Burroughs himself, discussing his discovery of a manuscript that has washed ashore in a Thermos bottle. The author of the manuscript is Bowen J. Tyler Jr., whose family’s factory has made the German U-boat that attacks him and his party in the Atlantic. After various exciting adventures, the American Bowen and his British comrades capture the Germans and take control of the submarine. Along for the ride is a young woman who, in another of Burroughs’ great coincidences, happens to be the fiancée of the German commandant because of an arranged engagement. After more turns of fortune, including the sabotage of a labor radical, they find themselves lost at sea, with their only hope of survival to be found on an unexplored island.

Once they figure out how to get to the seemingly inaccessible island, the story veers radically from contemporary wartime adventure to a subgenre of science fiction known as the lost-world story. Popular chiefly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lost-world stories defy the fact that by the time of their writing the planet had been largely mapped out and explored and instead were built on the premise that there could exist, in remote parts of the world, places unknown by and alien to modern civilization. One of Burroughs’ favorite authors was H. Rider Haggard, the chief writer within the subgenre. Also, Burroughs’ The Land That Time Forgot featured prehistoric beasts, as did Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), one of the major works of this type. The attacks of such creatures in Bowen’s narrative clearly indicate that this island is a different world indeed.

From this point, Bowen’s narrative relates their gradual understanding of the nature of this world—an understanding that is still limited by the conclusion of this part of the story. The next part is also a first-person narrative, here Bowen’s employee and friend Tom Billings, who organizes a rescue party only to find himself stranded on the island. In addition to having read Bowen’s manuscript, he learns more about the nature of life here. Finally, the last version shifts to a third-person narrative focused on Bradley, a member of Bowen’s party, tying up the loose ends of the story and revealing the last of the unresolved mysteries.

Central to these mysteries and to the nature of life on Caspak, as the island is called, is the notion of phylogeny recapitulating ontogeny—that is, the idea, now rejected by scientists, that human embryos developing in the womb reenact the evolutionary stages that preceded the development of human beings. In The Land That Time Forgot that notion is made literal, not within the womb but outside it. On Caspak, not only have the higher orders of subhumans come up from less advanced subhumans, but they have done so in a single lifetime; moreover, these subhumans developed from apelike primates, which developed from less-advanced mammals, which developed from lizards, and so on—a complete evolutionary history in a single individual. The idea is both ingenious, providing material for Burroughs’ fast-paced plot, and admittedly absurd. However, Burroughs knew of the evolutionary writings of Charles Darwin and took some efforts to present his pseudoscientific explanations as coherent if not exactly plausible. Perhaps more than any other writer working in the lost-world tradition, Burroughs attempted to reflect existing knowledge of biology, geology, and paleontology—even if, as Bleiler notes, "the paleontology of The Land That Time Forgot involves more fangs than facts."

More important than Burroughs’ use of the lost-world motif as a forum for discredited or poorly understood science is how the book’s Caspak, like Tarzan’s Africa and John Carter’s Mars, becomes an arena for his characters’ bravery. According to science-fiction historian Thomas D. Clareson, the most important theme of lost-race fiction—a subtype of lost-world fiction, featuring humans cut off from the rest of the world and their discovery by their modern counterparts—is the rejection of modern civilization and the embrace of primitivism. Clareson says of the works of these writers, Their narratives became increasingly a proving ground for the protagonists’ masculinity: survival in a hostile world; physical victory over sundry opponents; and the devotion of a sensuous and primitive woman. This description could easily be applied to much of Burroughs’ work, including The Land That Time Forgot but also the Tarzan books and most of his other novels as well.

In Burroughs’ fiction, primitivism serves a number of functions. Some critics, like Michael Orth, claim that Burroughs’ fiction takes its characters from the complexities of modern urban existence to pastoralism. To be sure, this may be true of Tarzan, but in The Land That Time Forgot the characters escape from contemporary urban complication to the dangerous realm of nature, and for the most part they are happy to escape it if possible. Similarly, in his 1963 essay on Tarzan, Gore Vidal remarks, In its naïve way, the Tarzan legend returns us to that Eden where, free of clothes and the inhibitions of an oppressive society, a man is able, as William Faulkner put it in his high Confederate style, to prevail as well as endure. The aim of daydream figures such as Tarzan, Vidal says, is to establish primacy in a world that, more and more, diminishes the individual. While such themes are apparent in The Land That Time Forgot, the rejection of civilization is less clear cut in this book, where sometimes the characters are forced to deal with savages and savage beasts under primitive conditions but usually are happy to stick to their guns when weapons are handy. But the ideal of the real man, stripped of the accoutrements of society as well as his clothes, who can stand up to any challenge with nothing but his wits and his bare hands, was a strong one for Burroughs and appears, although in a more ambiguous fashion than elsewhere, in The Land That Time Forgot.

Related to this theme in Burroughs’ fiction are two ideas that find expression in this book, Social Darwinism on the one hand and racism and nationalism on the other. Without editorializing—Burroughs is always sure to keep things moving—it is implied that those capable of surviving are superior to those who cannot, that survival of the fittest is the way of the world. Burroughs modifies this somewhat with his heroes’ adherence to a strict moral code more complex than might makes right, but his strong men—and, for all the capabilities of Burroughs’ admirable female characters, his heroes are men—are clearly set above others. They are, after all, idealized fantasy figures, intended for readers to identify with as well as admire.

And Burroughs’ heroes tend to be American or British, and in any event definitely of European descent. While the racism that plagues other Burroughs novels is less apparent here, nationalism is quite apparent, and the book in its initial magazine publication was virulently anti-German—in large part, he later wrote with regret, in response to the propaganda generated during the Great War. Prior to the book publication of The Land That Time Forgot, he considered changing the German villains to Austrians so as not to hurt his German sales; instead he toned down the more egregious passages, and in later works wrote about sympathetic Germans.

If the Germans are among the villains in The Land That Time Forgot, what are the women? Although the female characters are intelligent and brave, they are essentially objects of romance and occasionally damsels in distress, opportunities for the male heroes to demonstrate not only their love but also their courage and prowess. At the same time, it is significant that in each of the three stories each hero has a love interest. One might think that Burroughs’ male readers would have disliked the intrusion of romance into the action, but again Burroughs knew his audience and realized that readers’ fantasies could involve sex as well as violence. It is surely no coincidence that neither Bowen nor Billings claims to be a ladies’ man—which undoubtedly applied to many of Burroughs’ young male readers, who could at least vicariously enjoy these characters’ romantic successes.

Not that there is anything terribly erotic in The Land That Time Forgot, apart from modest descriptions of scantily clad men and women. Burroughs manages the rare feat of being both prurient and chaste, and although there is ample nudity in Burroughs’ work, science-fiction writer and historian Brian W. Aldiss points out, sexual intercourse is neither mentioned nor implied. . . . Yet clearly, as Aldiss and other critics have observed, there is a dangerous erotic edge to Burroughs’ stories, supplied by the perpetual threat of rape. Not only does the hero’s rescue of the endangered female prove his heroism, but it also demonstrates his ability to control the lust and violence from which he saves her.

Here again one can see one of the major thematic tensions in The Land That Time Forgot and other Burroughs novels, the conflict between civilization and primitivism. In Burroughs’ work, civilization certainly has its problems. This is presented most clearly in his first Tarzan novel, where the hero gratefully returns to the jungle after experiencing the savagery of modern life in Europe. Yet Tarzan and other atavistic Burroughs heroes are men, not animals, and as such they adhere to a firm moral code, which includes protecting the innocent. Burroughs’ heroes are thus akin to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s noble savages, romantic figures who are civilized despite the corrupting influences of modern civilization. Yet these romantic figures function not in an edenic paradise, where the lion lies with the lamb, but in a Hobbesian state of nature, where life is nasty, brutish, and short, where the rule is eat or be eaten.

A related tension occurs in The Land That Time Forgot in its characters’ attitudes about science and religion. In the story, evolution is taken for granted, but this is no naturalistic world, even if characters occasionally refer to fate. Rather, a religious element pervades the story; even if the characters are not explicitly religious, they refer frequently to God, faith in whom is not viewed as incompatible with an acceptance of the evolutionary marvels surrounding them. Yet they expect no divine miracles to preserve them, believing—to echo Benjamin Franklin’s famous phrase—that God helps those who help themselves.

Recurrent themes such as these as well as the threat of rape, racism and nationalism, and Social Darwinism, all of which are evident in The Land That Time Forgot, have provided ample opportunities for scholars to explore aspects of Burroughs’ work that, like much popular fiction, reveal important facts about the author, his audience, and his times. Such attention was slow in coming to Burroughs’ fiction, which suffered critical dismissal during his lifetime and critical neglect until the 1960s, when scholars began to approach the products of popular culture with a new critical eye. Thus, in addition to analyzing persistent themes, Burroughs scholars have explored his creation of new heroic myths, his exploitation of his readers’ fantasies, and his influence on other writers (particularly in the field of science fiction) and in mass media.

Certainly Burroughs’ cultural influence has been extensive. This is most obvious regarding Tarzan, but even The Land That Time Forgot has, in contributing to the lost-world subgenre of science fiction, helped to influence numerous later works, ranging from Carl Barks’ comic book adventures featuring Scrooge McDuck, his nephew Donald Duck, and Donald’s nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie to Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park (1990) and its sequel, The Lost World (1995). The book also inspired two motion pictures, adapted from the first two sections. The Land That Time Forgot (1975) was a fairly faithful adaptation, and one of the screen-writers was the British fantasy and science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock; The People That Time Forgot (1977) is a far looser adaptation. While not terrible, neither film is outstanding, and occasionally the prehistoric creatures are laughable instead of terrifying.

Most readers of The Land That Time Forgot feel the monsters they conjure in their minds are far more engaging. For all his faults, there is no denying that Burroughs was a master storyteller, capable of transporting his readers into exciting adventures. As Vidal wrote, Though Burroughs is innocent of literature and cannot reproduce human speech, he does have a gift very few writers of any kind possess: he can describe action vividly. Burroughs has enthralled generations of readers with this gift, and The Land That Time Forgot stands as an example of Burroughs at his best.

Darren Harris-Fain is an associate professor of English at Shawnee State University in Portsmouth, Ohio. He has edited three volumes on British fantasy and science-fiction writers for the Dictionary of Literary Biography and is the author of Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Age of Maturity, 1970-2000 (University of South Carolina Press, 2005).

PART I

THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT

CHAPTER I

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 I 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 southern-most 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 shipbuilders. 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 had 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 life-belts. 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 lids 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 all 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