three o'clock in the afternoon
It must have been a little after three o'clock in the afternoon that it happened -- the afternoon of June 3rd , 1916 . It seems incredible that all that I have passed through -- all those weird and terrifying experiences -- should have been encompassed within so short a span as three brief months . Rather might 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 .