The time-raider

The narrator recounts events beginning with an archaeologist's disappearance in ancient jungle ruins and his inexplicable reappearance years later, which prompts an investigation. Working with a scientist friend, the narrator describes encounters with an entity that abducts people by displacing them through time, combining personal testimony with discussion of laboratory experiments and theories of time-displacement. The narrative focuses on the narrator's direct contacts with the Raider and on the lives darkened by its interventions, moving between field reports, scientific analysis, and efforts to understand and resist a predatory force that removes individuals from their proper eras.