Bowen J. Taylor, an American, recounts how he was held captive aboard a German U-boat in World War I. And when he thought his situation was precarious enough, he finds himself on the rocky shores of a lost world where time had stopped, and where creatures thought long to be extinct roam free. "I have experienced a cosmic cycle, with all its changes and evolutions for that which I have seen with my own eyes in this brief interval of time-things that no other mortal eye had seen before, glimpses of a world past, a world dead, a world so long dead that even in the lowest Cambrian stratum no trace of it remains. Fused with the melting inner crust, it has passed forever beyond the ken of man other than in that lost pocket of the earth whither fate has borne me and where my doom is sealed. I am here and here must remain."