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Chapter 1It must have been a little after three o'clock in the afternoon that ithappened--the afternoon of June 3rd, 1916. It seems incredible thatall that I have passed through--all those weird and terrifyingexperiences--should have been encompassed within so short a span asthree brief months. Rather might I have experienced a cosmic cycle,with all its changes and evolutions for that which I have seen with myown eyes in this brief interval of time--things that no other mortaleye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world solong dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of itremains. Fused with the melting inner crust, it has passed foreverbeyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket of the earthwhither fate has borne me and where my doom is sealed. I am here andhere must remain.After reading this far, my interest, which already had been stimulatedby the finding of the manuscript, was approaching the boiling-point. Ihad come to Greenland for the summer, on the advice of my physician,and was slowly being bored to extinction, as I had thoughtlesslyneglected to bring sufficient reading-matter. Being an indifferentfisherman, my enthusiasm for this form of sport soon waned; yet in theabsence of other forms of recreation I was now risking my life in anentirely inadequate boat off Cape Farewell at the southernmostextremity of Greenland.Greenland! As a descriptive appellation, it is a sorry joke--but mystory has nothing to do with Greenland, nothing to do with me; so Ishall get through with the one and the other as rapidly as possible.The inadequate boat finally arrived at a precarious landing, thenatives, waist-deep in the surf, assisting. I was carried ashore, andwhile the evening meal was being prepared, I wandered to and fro alongthe rocky, shattered shore. Bits of surf-harried beach clove the worngranite, or whatever the rocks of Cape Farewell may be composed of, andas I followed the ebbing tide down one of these soft stretches, I sawthe thing. Were one to bump into a Bengal tiger in the ravine behindthe Bimini Baths, one could be no more surprised than was I to see aperfectly good quart thermos bottle turning and twisting in the surf ofCape Farewell at the southern extremity of Greenland. I rescued it, butI was soaked above the knees doing it; and then I sat down in the sandand opened it, and in the long twilight read the manuscript, neatlywritten and tightly folded, which was its contents.
