Beyond Thirty (The Lost Continent) by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Title: Beyond Thirty (The Lost Continent).
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Genre: Fiction, science fiction, pop fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 1916.
Summary: By the year 2137 Europe has become a largely forgotten, savage wilderness. Fierce bands of hunters rove the crumbling ruins of once mighty, war-ravaged cities. On the other side of the Atlantic a prosperous Pan-American Federation has emerged, claiming all lands and seas between the 30th and 175th longitudes and forbidding contact with the rest of the world. All who cross beyond thirty are sentenced to death. Captain Jefferson Turck and the crew of his aero-submarine, who through accident and sabotage are forced beyond the thirtieth longitude, embark on an epic quest to rediscover the legendary lands of the Old World.
My rating: 7/10.
♥ As I thought upon my misfortune, I considered more clearly than ever before the unrighteousness of the regulation which was to prove my doom, and in the natural revolt against its injustice my anger rose, and there mounted within me a feeling which I imagine must have paralleled that spirit that once was prevalent among the ancients called anarchy.
For the first time in my life I found my sentiments arraying themselves against custom, tradition, and even government. The wave of rebellion swept over me in an instant, beginning with an heretical doubt as to the sanctity of the established order of things - that fetish which has ruled Pan-Americans for two centuries, and which is based upon a blind faith in the infallibility of the prescience of the long-dead framers of the articles of Pan-American federation - and ending in an adamantine determination to defend my honor and my life to the last ditch against the blind and senseless regulation which assumed the synonymity of misfortune and treason.
I would replace that destroyed instruments upon the bridge; every officer and man should know when we crossed thirty. But then I should assert the spirit which dominated me, I should resist arrest, and insist upon bringing my ship back across the dead line, remaining at my post until we had reached New York. Then I should make a full report, and with it demand upon public opinion that the dead lines be wiped forever from the seas.
I knew that I was right. I knew that no more loyal officer wore the uniform of the navy. I knew that I was a good officer and sailor, and I didn’t propose submitting to degradation and discharge because a lot of old, preglacial fossils had declared over two hundred years before that no man should cross thirty.
♥ “Very well, then, let us live while we live, and enjoy to the fullest whatever of adventure or pleasure each new day brings, since any day may be our last, and we shall be dead for a considerable while.”
♥ Victory asked me to explain the difference between the two, and when I had tried to do so as clearly as possible, she broke into a gay little laugh.
“Oh,” she cried, “then I am a barbarian!”
I could not but laugh, too, as I admitted that she was, indeed, a barbarian. She was not offended, taking the matter as a huge joke. But some thereafter she sat in silence, apparently deep in thought. Finally she looked up at me, her strong white teeth gleaming behind her smiling lips.
“Should you take that thing you call ‘razor’” she said, “and cut the hair from the face of Thirty-six, and exchange garments with you, you would be the barbarian and Thirty-six the civilized man. There is no other difference between you, except your weapons. Clothe you in a wolfskin, give you a knife and spear, and set you down in the woods of Grabritin - of what service would you civilization be to you?”
♥ Matters remained thus for several days, and we continued our journey up the Rhine. At Cologne, I had hoped to find some reassuring indications, but there was no Cologne. And as there had been no other cities along the river up to that point, the devastation was infinitely greater than time alone could have wrought. Great guns, bombs, and mines must have leveled every building that man had raised, and then nature, unhindered, had covered the ghastly evidence of human depravity with her beauteous mantle of verdure. Splendid trees reared their stately tops where splendid cathedrals once had reared their domes, and sweet wild flowers blossomed in simple serenity in soil that once was drenched with human blood.
Nature had reclaimed what man had once stolen from her and defiled. A herd of zebras grazed where once the German kaiser may have reviewed his troops. An antelope rested peacefully in a bed of daisies where, perhaps, two hundred years ago a big gun belched its terror-laden messages of death, of hate, of destruction against the works of man and God alike.