The Land That Time Forgot

On a stony beach at the southern tip of Greenland, a bored summer traveller pulls a quart thermos bottle out of the surf and finds a folded manuscript inside it. The story it tells begins on 3 June 1916, when a German submarine torpedoes an American liner in the English Channel. Bowen Tyler, the son of a Californian shipbuilder, goes into the water with his Airedale, Nobs, is saved by an empty lifeboat, and pulls a half-drowned girl, Lys La Rue, out of the sea.

A British tug rescues them, and when the same submarine attacks again the tug's crew swarms onto her deck and takes her. Bowen, who helped build this very boat, is put in command of the U-33 — with nine German prisoners below and, in irons among them, Baron Friedrich von Schoenvorts, the officer Lys was once engaged to marry. No port will believe their flag. Someone aboard throws the wireless overboard, smashes the sextant and bends the compass, and for weeks the boat wanders off every chart while Bowen wrongly suspects the woman he loves. The traitor turns out to be one of his own crew, but by then the drinking water is poisoned and the only land in sight is a wall of cliffs with no beach and no harbour: Caprona.

Warm fresh water flowing out of the rock leads them to a tunnel, and the submarine dives under the cliffs into Caspak — a hot inner country of giant ferns, flying reptiles, dinosaurs and tribes of half-men who all believe that one day they will "be Galu". Germans and Englishmen swear a truce and build a stone fort. Then von Schoenvorts refines oil, shells the fort and steals the submarine; on the same morning an ape-man carries Lys away.

Bowen tracks her north, kills her captor, loses her again, and is finally driven, lost and alone, to the summit of the barrier cliffs, where he writes this record. In the last pages Lys reaches him, he kills the hatchet-man hunting her, they marry themselves under the moon, and the sealed bottle goes into the Pacific — the only message from two people who will never leave Caspak.