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- Herausgeber: Al-Mashreq eBookstore
- Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
- Sprache: Englisch
The Land Where Time Stood Still by Arthur Leo Zagat is a mesmerizing journey into a hidden world where the laws of time have been suspended. When a group of explorers stumbles upon an uncharted land deep within a forgotten jungle, they discover a realm where ancient creatures roam and lost civilizations thrive, untouched by the passage of millennia. But what begins as an adventure of discovery soon turns into a desperate struggle for survival as the explorers realize that escaping this timeless land may be impossible. Faced with dangers from both the distant past and an unknown future, can they find a way out before they too become relics of a forgotten era?
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Seitenzahl: 46
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Table of Contents
Cover
Table of Contents
The Land Where Time Stood Still
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I. — INTO NOTHINGNESS
II. — TRAPPED BY FLAME
III. — LAIR OF THE FUTURE-MEN
IV. — THE SIEGE OF THE PRIMITIVES
V. — THE PRIMITIVES TAKE THE CRATER
VI. — THROUGH THE EDDY
Landmarks
Table of Contents
Cover
The Land Where Time Stood Still
I. — INTO NOTHINGNESS
IT was, perhaps, the almost unbelievable antiquity of Silbury Hill that oppressed Ronald Stratton with a queasy premonition of disaster. He thought again of the old legend: that anyone entering the stone rings on top of Silbury Hill between dusk and dawn vanished, leaving no trace. The thought lingered.
The twilight silence, the low-lying layer of ground mist veiling his footing, the chill of evening damp striking into his very bones, combined to trouble the young American with sinister unreality. Something of that feeling had been with him all during the journey through England's South Country; had troubled him as he stood on Salisbury Plain where, twenty years before, had drilled the father he had never known, proud in the uniform of his ancestral land.
Tall and clean-limbed and lithe the American volunteer must have been then, bronze-skinned and frank-eyed as his son now was who retraced in a nostalgic memorial tour the route of his hero father's last voyage. Silbury was part of that sentimental pilgrimage—
Ron Stratton suddenly stumbled, sprawling into a grass-hidden ditch. He rolled, caught at whipping tendrils of a bush, pulled himself to his feet. He took a step forward—into the wrenching, frantic instant of sheer nothingness!
It was as if he had walked over the brink of a sheer precipice, save that, though a bottomless abyss yawned fearfully beneath him, he oddly knew no sensation of falling. The world, the universe had simply vanished from beneath him.
His foot came down on solid ground. Stratton pulled in a gasping, choked breath between his teeth. He'd never before experienced anything like that moment of terrific giddiness, of deathlike vertigo. Queer. The light seemed to have grown stronger. It filtered through the trees with a reddish grow somehow eerie?
The trees! How had he come into this forest? There hadn't been any trees at all, a moment ago! Was he dreaming?
Something scampered through the brush behind Stratton, and he whirled to the sound. A brown beastlet popped into sight between two rugged boles, a perfectly formed horse not knee-high to the man. Great, limpid eyes were startled in the miniature head—and then the creature had spun around and vanished.
RONALD STRATTON stared at the spot where it had been. He managed to get himself moving, managed to get to where he could look down upon the hoof-prints. The tracks were unmistakable. Three-toed, those were the traces of an Eohippus, of that forgotten ancestor of the horse extinct before man's first anthropoid progenitor learned to swing along arboreal highways by four clutching paws and a prehensile tail.
Stratton's scalp made a tight cap for his skull. His hands were out in a peculiar, thrusting gesture, as though he were trying to push away some dreadful thing that was closing in upon, him. What had happened to him? Where was he?
A scream sliced the forest stillness, a woman's scream, high and shrill and compact with terror. Stratton's head jerked up to it, to the swift threshing of someone running through the thicket. Something white flicked among the trees, took shape in the form of a running girl. Long blond braids streamed behind her, and her face was as white as the white robe fluttering about her slim form. Her fear-dilated eyes saw him as she went past. "Help me, I prithee," she screamed; and her archaic appeal was blotted out by a horrid, bestial roar blasting from leaf-veiled aisles whence she came, by the thunder of a far heavier body pursuing her.
The underbrush tossed in the grip of a whirling tornado, parted to the plunge of a huge, hairy creature who ran half-crouched and bellowing.
The American leaped for the monster, flailed frantic fists at a brutal, leathery visage. His blows pounded against rock-hard bone, pitifully ineffectual. Something struck him, catapulted him backward. For the first time he saw clearly the thing he had attacked, and amazement seared through him.
It—it wasn't a gorilla, despite the stiff black hair covering its big-thewed haunches, despite its chinless, flat-nosed, beetling-browed countenance. A ragged pelt was slung about its waist. It clutched a wooden-handled, flint-headed axe in one spatulate-fingered hand; and in its lurid, beady eyes there was a groping, grotesque sort of intelligence not quite bestial. It was a man, a man from out the dawn of time. A Neanderthal man, whose like had vanished from the earth countless eons ago.
The ape-man's black, thick lips snarled back from yellow fangs. His neckless throat pulsated, vented a nerve-shattering, insensate roar. Threat was fierce in that horrid ululation, but underlying the menace a singular note of inquiry seemed to signal a bewilderment in the creature's small brain as great as Stratton's own. That was what had checked its charge, what held it now, momentarily hesitant.
In that instant of reprieve Stratton heard the bush rustle behind him, felt a twitch at his right hand. His fingers closed on something hard that fitted into his palm.
