The TIME-RAIDER
By EDMOND HAMILTON
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Weird Tales October, November December 1927 and January 1928.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
"He dangled helplessly in the thing's embrace."
CHAPTER 1
THE CANNELL MYSTERY
In beginning this account of our great adventure, it must be understoodthat I attempt no complete history of the matter. There will be gaps,many gaps, in the continuity of my story, for that story remains, afterall, simply a record of my own contacts with the Raider, and with thosepeople whose lives he entered and darkened. So that my tale here isnecessarily one of personal experience, except for a few places where Ihave summarized general knowledge.
Besides this history of what I may term the more human side of ourexperience, Dr. Lantin has dealt with its scientific aspects in hisepochal work on time-displacement and in our joint monograph onelectronic acceleration. Although several salient features of theaffair have been omitted, for reasons that will figure later, yet thetwo works mentioned and the present record give a broad outline of thewhole matter, from the beginning.
From the beginning! But where was that beginning? Ages back in thepast, or ages ahead in the future? To place the true beginning of itall would be to know much about it that we do not know. So I start atthe point where the matter definitely entered my own life and world.And that point, that event, is the Cannell Mystery, as it was thentermed.
You will find it in the newspapers of the day, the bare facts wrappedin clouds of speculation. Professor Ferdinand Cannell, of New York,disappearing inexplicably in the jungles of Indo-China, vanishing fromthe world of men as though blotted out.
At that time, Cannell was undoubtedly one of the very greatest ofliving archeologists. Nominally attached to a great New York museum,he was really a free-lance student and excavator, roaming about theworld in search of proof for his numerous and startling theories. Hisfirst fame had been established by his researches into the Dravidianremnants in lower India, and he had followed that brilliant achievementby another as great, the monumental Warren Society investigation intothe walled ruins of Zimbabwe, in South Africa.
With two such successes behind him, Cannell then boldly proposed tomake the subject of his next researches the mighty ruined city ofAngkor, in the heart of the Cambodian jungle. Angkor has long been acolossal challenge to modern wisdom, a gigantic, towered metropolis ofgray stone, once noisy with the life of swarming millions, but silentand dead now, unutterably dead. A thousand years the huge ruin has lainin the jungle, wrapped in silence, inhabited only by snakes and batsand tigers. Its past, the history of its builders, has been a vastenigma always, which Cannell had determined to solve.
So he sailed for Hongkong, and Dr. Lantin and I were on the dock whenhis ship cleared. My own acquaintance with Cannell was recent, butLantin and he had been close friends for years. Their friendship datedback to their university days, and had continued after they divergedinto different li