Tales of the Primal Land — Brian Lumley

THE PRIMAL LAND...
...Was in fact a primal continent, but that was so long ago--even before Uthmal and Mu, and long before comparatively recent Atlantis--that a majority of today's palaeoethnologists might never be persuaded of its existence. But now let it be known that there was in Primal Theem'hdra (the vast island continent's name,) an hitherto unsuspected, even unimagined Age of Man, where barbarous nomadic tribes wandered the stony steppes and thirsty, burning deserts, while self-styled ''civilized'' folk dwelled in the so-called ''sophisticate cities'' of more luxuriant, mainly coastal, semi-tropical and agricultural regions...in its way a world much like that of today, albeit in a guise exquisitely prehistoric.

But the Primal Land's peoples were among the first human races, when mutable evolutionary processes together with a vacillating Nature were as yet undecided which abilities, both mental and physical--and metaphysical--men should be allowed to retain and develop down all the ages, and which to abort as unworkable and even dangerous...

And thus there was true, often dark magic in those times, while in our ''enlightened'' age we have found different names for such as Magicians, Sorcerers and flying carpets; for Nature has never ceased her dabbling, and now we acknowledge such words as telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation and so on almost casually, haphazardly. But just think: wasn't Einstein himself a Magician, whose ''runes'' were surely as powerful as any Wizard's in ancient Theem'hdra?

These then are the surviving tales--or the ''fables'' if you prefer--of an age of men and monsters, and of Wizards both black and white, in a time before Pangea and a world predating the dinosaurs...