ck to the birth time of our own outer world to look
upon its lands and seas ages before man had traversed either. Here was
a new world, all untouched. It called to me to explore it. I was
dreaming of the excitement and adventure which lay before us could
Perry and I but escape the Mahars, when something, a slight noise I
imagine, drew my attention behind me.

As I turned, romance, adventure, and discovery in the abstract took
wing before the terrible embodiment of all three in concrete form that
I beheld advancing upon me.

A huge, slimy amphibian it was, with toad-like body and the mighty jaws
of an alligator. Its immense carcass must have weighed tons, and yet
it moved swiftly and silently toward me. Upon one hand was the bluff
that ran from the canyon to the sea, on the other the fearsome swamp
from which the creature had sneaked upon me, behind lay the mighty
untracked sea, and before me in the center of the narrow way that led
to safety stood this huge mountain of terrible and menacing flesh.

A single glance at the thing was sufficient to assure me that I was
facing one of those long-extinct, prehistoric creatures whose
fossilized remains are found within the outer crust as far back as the
Triassic formation, a gigantic labyrinthodon. And there I was,
unarmed, and, with the exception of a loin cloth, as naked as I had
come into the world. I could imagine how my first ancestor felt that
distant, prehistoric morn that he encountered for the first time the
terrifying progenitor of the thing that had me cornered now beside the
restless, mysterious sea.

Unquestionably he had escaped, or I should not have been within
Pellucidar or elsewhere, and I wished at that moment that he had handed
down to me with the various attributes that I presumed I have inherited
from him, the specific application of the instinct of self-preservation
which saved him from the fate which loomed so close before me today.

To seek escape in the swamp or in the ocean would have been similar to
jumping into a den of lions to escape one upon the outside. The sea
and swamp both were doubtless alive with these mighty, carnivorous
amphibians, and if not, the individual that menaced me would pursue me
into either the sea or the swamp with equal facility.

There seemed nothing to do but stand supinely and await my end. I
thought of Perry--how he would wonder what had become of me. I thought
of my friends of the outer world, and of how t