The gods of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs · English · Gutenberg #64 · 469,690 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The gods of Mars
Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Release date: May 1, 1993 [eBook #64]
Most recently updated: July 26, 2026
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64
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[Illustration]
The Gods of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Contents
CHAPTER I. The Plant Men
CHAPTER II. A Forest Battle
CHAPTER III. The Chamber of Mystery
CHAPTER IV. Thuvia
CHAPTER V. Corridors of Peril
CHAPTER VI. The Black Pirates of Barsoom
CHAPTER VII. A Fair Goddess
CHAPTER VIII. The Depths of Omean
CHAPTER IX. Issus, Goddess of Life Eternal
CHAPTER X. The Prison Isle of Shador
CHAPTER XI. When Hell Broke Loose
CHAPTER XII. Doomed to Die
CHAPTER XIII. A Break for Liberty
CHAPTER XIV. The Eyes in the Dark
CHAPTER XV. Flight and Pursuit
CHAPTER XVI. Under Arrest
CHAPTER XVII. The Death Sentence
CHAPTER XVIII. Sola's Story
CHAPTER XIX. Black Despair
CHAPTER XX. The Air Battle
CHAPTER XXI. Through Flood and Flame
CHAPTER XXII. Victory and Defeat
FOREWORD
Twelve years had passed since I had laid the body of my great-uncle,
Captain John Carter, of Virginia, away from the sight of men in that
strange mausoleum in the old cemetery at Richmond.
Often had I pondered on the odd instructions he had left me governing
the construction of his mighty tomb, and especially those parts which
directed that he be laid in an _open_ casket and that the ponderous
mechanism which controlled the bolts of the vault’s huge door be
accessible _only from the inside_.
Twelve years had passed since I had read the remarkable manuscript of
this remarkable man; this man who remembered no childhood and who could
not even offer a vague guess as to his age; who was always young and
yet who had dandled my grandfather’s great-grandfather upon his knee;
this man who had spent ten years upon the planet Mars; who had fought
for the green men of Barsoom and fought against them; who had fought
for and against the red men and who had won the ever beautiful Dejah
Thoris, Princess of Helium, for his wife, and for nearly ten years had
been a prince of the house of Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium.
Twelve years had passed since his body had been found upon the bluff
before his cottage overlooking the Hudson, and oft-times during these
long years I had wondered if John Carter were really dead, or if he
again roamed the dead sea bottoms of that dying planet; if he had
returned to Barsoom to find that he had opened the frowning portals of
the mighty atmosphere plant in time to save the countless millions who
were dying of asphyxiation on that far-gone day that had seen him
hurtled ruthlessly through forty-eight million miles of space back to
Earth once more. I had wondered if he had found his black-haired
Princess and the slender son he had dreamed was with her in the royal
gardens of Tardos Mors, awaiting his return.
Or, had he found that he had been too late, and thus gone back to a
living death upon a dead world? Or was he really dead after all, never
to return either to his mother Earth or his beloved Mars?
Thus was I lost in useless speculation one sultry August evening when
old Ben, my body servant, handed me a telegram. Tearing it open I read:
‘Meet me to-morrow hotel Raleigh Richmond.
‘JOHN CARTER’
Early the next morning I took the first train for Richmond and within
two hours was being ushered into the room occupied by John Carter.
As I entered he rose to greet me, his old-time cordial smile of welcome
lighting his handsome face. Apparently he had not aged a minute, but
was still the straight, clean-limbed fighting-man of thirty. His keen
grey eyes were undimmed, and the only lines upon his face were the
lines of iron character and determination that always had been there
since first I remembered him, nearly thirty-five years before.
“Well, nephew,” he greeted me, “do you feel as though you were seeing a
ghost, or suffering from the effects of too many of Uncle Ben’s
juleps?”
“Juleps, I reckon,” I replied, “for I certainly feel mighty good; but
maybe it’s just the sight of you again that affects me. You have been
back to Mars? Tell me. And Dejah Thoris? You found her well and
awaiting you?”
“Yes, I have been to Barsoom again, and—but it’s a long story, too long
to tell in the limited time I have before I must return. I have learned
the secret, nephew, and I may traverse the trackless void at my will,
coming and going between the countless planets as I list; but my heart
is always in Barsoom, and while it is there in the keeping of my
Martian Princess, I doubt that I shall ever again leave the dying world
that is my life.
“I have come now because my affection for you prompted me to see you
once more before you pass over for ever into that other life that I
shall never know, and which though I have died thrice and shall die
again to-night, as you know death, I am as unable to fathom as are you.
“Even the wise and mysterious therns of Barsoom, that ancient cult
which for countless ages has been credited with holding the secret of
life and death in their impregnable fastnesses upon the hither slopes
of the Mountains of Otz, are as ignorant as we. I have proved it,
though I near lost my life in the doing of it; but you shall read it
all in the notes I have been making during the last three months that I
have been back upon Earth.”
He patted a swelling portfolio that lay on the table at his elbow.
“I know that you are interested and that you believe, and I know that
the world, too, is interested, though they will not believe for many
years; yes, for many ages, since they cannot understand. Earth men have
not yet progressed to a point where they can comprehend the things that
I have written in those notes.
“Give them what you wish of it, what you think will not harm them, but
do not feel aggrieved if they laugh at you.”
That night I walked down to the cemetery with him. At the door of his
vault he turned and pressed my hand.
“Good-bye, nephew,” he said. “I may never see you again, for I doubt
that I can ever bring myself to leave my wife and boy while they live,
and the span of life upon Barsoom is often more than a thousand years.”
He entered the vault. The great door swung slowly to. The ponderous
bolts grated into place. The lock clicked. I have never seen Captain
John Carter, of Virginia, since.
But here is the story of his return to Mars on that other occasion, as
I have gleaned it from the great mass of notes which he left for me
upon the table of his room in the hotel at Richmond.
There is much which I have left out; much which I have not dared to
tell; but you will find the story of his second search for Dejah
Thoris, Princess of Helium, even more remarkable than was his first
manuscript which I gave to an unbelieving world a short time since and
through which we followed the fighting Virginian across dead sea
bottoms under the moons of Mars.
E. R. B.
CHAPTER I
THE PLANT MEN
As I stood upon the bluff before my cottage on that clear cold night in
the early part of March, 1886, the noble Hudson flowing like the grey
and silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt again the strange,
compelling influence of the mighty god of war, my beloved Mars, which
for ten long and lonesome years I had implored with outstretched arms
to carry me back to my lost love.
Not since that other March night in 1866, when I had stood without that
Arizona cave in which my still and lifeless body lay wrapped in the
similitude of earthly death had I felt the irresistible attraction of
the god of my profession.
With arms outstretched toward the red eye of the great star I stood
praying for a return of that strange power which twice had drawn me
through the immensity of space, praying as I had prayed on a thousand
nights before during the long ten years that I had waited and hoped.
Suddenly a qualm of nausea swept over me, my senses swam, my knees gave
beneath me and I pitched headlong to the ground upon the very verge of
the dizzy bluff.
Instantly my brain cleared and there swept back across the threshold of
my memory the vivid picture of the horrors of that ghostly Arizona
cave; again, as on that far-gone night, my muscles refused to respond
to my will and again, as though even here upon the banks of the placid
Hudson, I could hear the awful moans and rustling of the fearsome thing
which had lurked and threatened me from the dark recesses of the cave,
I made the same mighty and superhuman effort to break the bonds of the
strange anaesthesia which held me, and again came the sharp click as of
the sudden parting of a taut wire, and I stood naked and free beside
the staring, lifeless thing that had so recently pulsed with the warm,
red life-blood of John Carter.
With scarcely a parting glance I turned my eyes again toward Mars,
lifted my hands toward his lurid rays, and waited.
Nor did I have long to wait; for scarce had I turned ere I shot with
the rapidity of thought into the awful void before me. There was the
same instant of unthinkable cold and utter darkness that I had
experienced twenty years before, and then I opened my eyes in another
world, beneath the burning rays of a hot sun, which beat through a tiny
opening in the dome of the mighty forest in which I lay.
The scene that met my eyes was so un-Martian that my heart sprang to my
throat as the sudden fear swept through me that I had been aimlessly
tossed upon some strange planet by a cruel fate.
Why not? What guide had I through the trackless waste of interplanetary
space? What assurance that I might not as well be hurtled to some
far-distant star of another solar system, as to Mars?
I lay upon a close-cropped sward of red grasslike vegetation, and about
me stretched a grove of strange and beautiful trees, covered with huge
and gorgeous blossoms and filled with brilliant, voiceless birds. I
call them birds since they were winged, but mortal eye ne’er rested on
such odd, unearthly shapes.
The vegetation was similar to that which covers the lawns of the red
Martians of the great waterways, but the trees and birds were unlike
anything that I had ever seen upon Mars, and then through the further
trees I could see that most un-Martian of all sights—an open sea, its
blue waters shimmering beneath the brazen sun.
As I rose to investigate further I experienced the same ridiculous
catastrophe that had met my first attempt to walk under Martian
conditions. The lesser attraction of this smaller planet and the
reduced air pressure of its greatly rarefied atmosphere, afforded so
little resistance to my earthly muscles that the ordinary exertion of
the mere act of rising sent me several feet into the air and
precipitated me upon my face in the soft and brilliant grass of this
strange world.
This experience, however, gave me some slightly increased assurance
that, after all, I might indeed be in some, to me, unknown corner of
Mars, and this was very possible since during my ten years’ residence
upon the planet I had explored but a comparatively tiny area of its
vast expanse.
I arose again, laughing at my forgetfulness, and soon had mastered once
more the art of attuning my earthly sinews to these changed conditions.
As I walked slowly down the imperceptible slope toward the sea I could
not help but note the park-like appearance of the sward and trees. The
grass was as close-cropped and carpet-like as some old English lawn and
the trees themselves showed evidence of careful pruning to a uniform
height of about fifteen feet from the ground, so that as one turned his
glance in any direction the forest had the appearance at a little
distance of a vast, high-ceiled chamber.
All these evidences of careful and systematic cultivation convinced me
that I had been fortunate enough to make my entry into Mars on this
second occasion through the domain of a civilized people and that when
I should find them I would be accorded the courtesy and protection that
my rank as a Prince of the house of Tardos Mors entitled me to.
The trees of the forest attracted my deep admiration as I proceeded
toward the sea. Their great stems, some of them fully a hundred feet in
diameter, attested their prodigious height, which I could only guess
at, since at no point could I penetrate their dense foliage above me to
more than sixty or eighty feet.
As far aloft as I could see the stems and branches and twigs were as
smooth and as highly polished as the newest of American-made pianos.
The wood of some of the trees was as black as ebony, while their
nearest neighbours might perhaps gleam in the subdued light of the
forest as clear and white as the finest china, or, again, they were
azure, scarlet, yellow, or deepest purple.
And in the same way was the foliage as gay and variegated as the stems,
while the blooms that clustered thick upon them may not be described in
any earthly tongue, and indeed might challenge the language of the
gods.
As I neared the confines of the forest I beheld before me and between
the grove and the open sea, a broad expanse of meadow land, and as I
was about to emerge from the shadows of the trees a sight met my eyes
that banished all romantic and poetic reflection upon the beauties of
the strange landscape.
To my left the sea extended as far as the eye could reach, before me
only a vague, dim line indicated its further shore, while at my right a
mighty river, broad, placid, and majestic, flowed between scarlet banks
to empty into the quiet sea before me.
At a little distance up the river rose mighty perpendicular bluffs,
from the very base of which the great river seemed to rise.
But it was not these inspiring and magnificent evidences of Nature’s
grandeur that took my immediate attention from the beauties of the
forest. It was the sight of a score of figures moving slowly about the
meadow near the bank of the mighty river.
Odd, grotesque shapes they were; unlike anything that I had ever seen
upon Mars, and yet, at a distance, most manlike in appearance. The
larger specimens appeared to be about ten or twelve feet in height when
they stood erect, and to be proportioned as to torso and lower
extremities precisely as is earthly man.
Their arms, however, were very short, and from where I stood seemed as
though fashioned much after the manner of an elephant’s trunk, in that
they moved in sinuous and snakelike undulations, as though entirely
without bony structure, or if there were bones it seemed that they must
be vertebral in nature.
As I watched them from behind the stem of a huge tree, one of the
creatures moved slowly in my direction, engaged in the occupation that
seemed to be the principal business of each of them, and which
consisted in running their oddly shaped hands over the surface of the
sward, for what purpose I could not determine.
As he approached quite close to me I obtained an excellent view of him,
and though I was later to become better acquainted with his kind, I may
say that that single cursory examination of this awful travesty on
Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires had I been a
free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy could not quickly
enough have carried me far from this hideous creature.
Its hairless body was a strange and ghoulish blue, except for a broad
band of white which encircled its protruding, single eye: an eye that
was all dead white—pupil, iris, and ball.
Its nose was a ragged, inflamed, circular hole in the centre of its
blank face; a hole that resembled more closely nothing that I could
think of other than a fresh bullet wound which has not yet commenced to
bleed.
Below this repulsive orifice the face was quite blank to the chin, for
the thing had no mouth that I could discover.
The head, with the exception of the face, was covered by a tangled mass
of jet-black hair some eight or ten inches in length. Each hair was
about the bigness of a large angleworm, and as the thing moved the
muscles of its scalp this awful head-covering seemed to writhe and
wriggle and crawl about the fearsome face as though indeed each
separate hair was endowed with independent life.
The body and the legs were as symmetrically human as Nature could have
fashioned them, and the feet, too, were human in shape, but of
monstrous proportions. From heel to toe they were fully three feet
long, and very flat and very broad.
As it came quite close to me I discovered that its strange movements,
running its odd hands over the surface of the turf, were the result of
its peculiar method of feeding, which consists in cropping off the
tender vegetation with its razorlike talons and sucking it up from its
two mouths, which lie one in the palm of each hand, through its
arm-like throats.
In addition to the features which I have already described, the beast
was equipped with a massive tail about six feet in length, quite round
where it joined the body, but tapering to a flat, thin blade toward the
end, which trailed at right angles to the ground.
By far the most remarkable feature of this most remarkable creature,
however, were the two tiny replicas of it, each about six inches in
length, which dangled, one on either side, from its armpits. They were
suspended by a small stem which seemed to grow from the exact tops of
their heads to where it connected them with the body of the adult.
Whether they were the young, or merely portions of a composite
creature, I did not know.
As I had been scrutinizing this weird monstrosity the balance of the
herd had fed quite close to me and I now saw that while many had the
smaller specimens dangling from them, not all were thus equipped, and I
further noted that the little ones varied in size from what appeared to
be but tiny unopened buds an inch in diameter through various stages of
development to the full-fledged and perfectly formed creature of ten to
twelve inches in length.
Feeding with the herd were many of the little fellows not much larger
than those which remained attached to their parents, and from the young
of that size the herd graded up to the immense adults.
Fearsome-looking as they were, I did not know whether to fear them or
not, for they did not seem to be particularly well equipped for
fighting, and I was on the point of stepping from my hiding-place and
revealing myself to them to note the effect upon them of the sight of a
man when my rash resolve was, fortunately for me, nipped in the bud by
a strange shrieking wail, which seemed to come from the direction of
the bluffs at my right.
Naked and unarmed, as I was, my end would have been both speedy and
horrible at the hands of these cruel creatures had I had time to put my
resolve into execution, but at the moment of the shriek each member of
the herd turned in the direction from which the sound seemed to come,
and at the same instant every particular snake-like hair upon their
heads rose stiffly perpendicular as if each had been a sentient
organism looking or listening for the source or meaning of the wail.
And indeed the latter proved to be the truth, for this strange growth
upon the craniums of the plant men of Barsoom represents the thousand
ears of these hideous creatures, the last remnant of the strange race
which sprang from the original Tree of Life.
Instantly every eye turned toward one member of the herd, a large
fellow who evidently was the leader. A strange purring sound issued
from the mouth in the palm of one of his hands, and at the same time he
started rapidly toward the bluff, followed by the entire herd.
Their speed and method of locomotion were both remarkable, springing as
they did in great leaps of twenty or thirty feet, much after the manner
of a kangaroo.
They were rapidly disappearing when it occurred to me to follow them,
and so, hurling caution to the winds, I sprang across the meadow in
their wake with leaps and bounds even more prodigious than their own,
for the muscles of an athletic Earth man produce remarkable results
when pitted against the lesser gravity and air pressure of Mars.
Their way led directly towards the apparent source of the river at the
base of the cliffs, and as I neared this point I found the meadow
dotted with huge boulders that the ravages of time had evidently
dislodged from the towering crags above.
For this reason I came quite close to the cause of the disturbance
before the scene broke upon my horrified gaze. As I topped a great
boulder I saw the herd of plant men surrounding a little group of
perhaps five or six green men and women of Barsoom.
That I was indeed upon Mars I now had no doubt, for here were members
of the wild hordes that people the dead sea bottoms and deserted cities
of that dying planet.
Here were the great males towering in all the majesty of their imposing
height; here were the gleaming white tusks protruding from their
massive lower jaws to a point near the centre of their foreheads, the
laterally placed, protruding eyes with which they could look forward or
backward, or to either side without turning their heads, here the
strange antennae-like ears rising from the tops of their foreheads; and
the additional pair of arms extending from midway between the shoulders
and the hips.
Even without the glossy green hide and the metal ornaments which
denoted the tribes to which they belonged, I would have known them on
the instant for what they were, for where else in all the universe is
their like duplicated?
There were two men and four females in the party and their ornaments
denoted them as members of different hordes, a fact which tended to
puzzle me infinitely, since the various hordes of green men of Barsoom
are eternally at deadly war with one another, and never, except on that
single historic instance when the great Tars Tarkas of Thark gathered a
hundred and fifty thousand green warriors from several hordes to march
upon the doomed city of Zodanga to rescue Dejah Thoris, Princess of
Helium, from the clutches of Than Kosis, had I seen green Martians of
different hordes associated in other than mortal combat.
But now they stood back to back, facing, in wide-eyed amazement, the
very evidently hostile demonstrations of a common enemy.
Both men and women were armed with long-swords and daggers, but no
firearms were in evidence, else it had been short shrift for the
gruesome plant men of Barsoom.
Presently the leader of the plant men charged the little party, and his
method of attack was as remarkable as it was effective, and by its very
strangeness was the more potent, since in the science of the green
warriors there was no defence for this singular manner of attack, the
like of which it soon was evident to me they were as unfamiliar with as
they were with the monstrosities which confronted them.
The plant man charged to within a dozen feet of the party and then,
with a bound, rose as though to pass directly above their heads. His
powerful tail was raised high to one side, and as he passed close above
them he brought it down in one terrific sweep that crushed a green
warrior’s skull as though it had been an eggshell.
The balance of the frightful herd was now circling rapidly and with
bewildering speed about the little knot of victims. Their prodigious
bounds and the shrill, screeching purr of their uncanny mouths were
well calculated to confuse and terrorize their prey, so that as two of
them leaped simultaneously from either side, the mighty sweep of those
awful tails met with no resistance and two more green Martians went
down to an ignoble death.
There were now but one warrior and two females left, and it seemed that
it could be but a matter of seconds ere these, also, lay dead upon the
scarlet sward.
But as two more of the plant men charged, the warrior, who was now
prepared by the experiences of the past few minutes, swung his mighty
long-sword aloft and met the hurtling bulk with a clean cut that clove
one of the plant men from chin to groin.
The other, however, dealt a single blow with his cruel tail that laid
both of the females crushed corpses upon the ground.
As the green warrior saw the last of his companions go down and at the
same time perceived that the entire herd was charging him in a body, he
rushed boldly to meet them, swinging his long-sword in the terrific
manner that I had so often seen the men of his kind wield it in their
ferocious and almost continual warfare among their own race.
Cutting and hewing to right and left, he laid an open path straight
through the advancing plant men, and then commenced a mad race for the
forest, in the shelter of which he evidently hoped that he might find a
haven of refuge.
He had turned for that portion of the forest which abutted on the
cliffs, and thus the mad race was taking the entire party farther and
farther from the boulder where I lay concealed.
As I had watched the noble fight which the great warrior had put up
against such enormous odds my heart had swelled in admiration for him,
and acting as I am wont to do, more upon impulse than after mature
deliberation, I instantly sprang from my sheltering rock and bounded
quickly toward the bodies of the dead green Martians, a well-defined
plan of action already formed.
Half a dozen great leaps brought me to the spot, and another instant
saw me again in my stride in quick pursuit of the hideous monsters that
were rapidly gaining on the fleeing warrior, but this time I grasped a
mighty long-sword in my hand and in my heart was the old blood lust of
the fighting man, and a red mist swam before my eyes and I felt my lips
respond to my heart in the old smile that has ever marked me in the
midst of the joy of battle.
Swift as I was I was none too soon, for the green warrior had been
overtaken ere he had made half the distance to the forest, and now he
stood with his back to a boulder, while the herd, temporarily balked,
hissed and screeched about him.
With their single eyes in the centre of their heads and every eye
turned upon their prey, they did not note my soundless approach, so
that I was upon them with my great long-sword and four of them lay dead
ere they knew that I was among them.
For an instant they recoiled before my terrific onslaught, and in that
instant the green warrior rose to the occasion and, springing to my
side, laid to the right and left of him as I had never seen but one
other warrior do, with great circling strokes that formed a figure
eight about him and that never stopped until none stood living to
oppose him, his keen blade passing through flesh and bone and metal as
though each had been alike thin air.
As we bent to the slaughter, far above us rose that shrill, weird cry
which I had heard once before, and which had called the herd to the
attack upon their victims. Again and again it rose, but we were too
much engaged with the fierce and powerful creatures about us to attempt
to search out even with our eyes the author of the horrid notes.
Great tails lashed in frenzied anger about us, razor-like talons cut
our limbs and bodies, and a green and sticky syrup, such as oozes from
a crushed caterpillar, smeared us from head to foot, for every cut and
thrust of our longswords brought spurts of this stuff upon us from the
severed arteries of the plant men, through which it courses in its
sluggish viscidity in lieu of blood.
Once I felt the great weight of one of the monsters upon my back and as
keen talons sank into my flesh I experienced the frightful sensation of
moist lips sucking the lifeblood from the wounds to which the claws
still clung.
I was very much engaged with a ferocious fellow who was endeavouring to
reach my throat from in front, while two more, one on either side, were
lashing viciously at me with their tails.
The green warrior was much put to it to hold his own, and I felt that
the unequal struggle could last but a moment longer when the huge
fellow discovered my plight, and tearing himself from those that
surrounded him, he raked the assailant from my back with a single sweep
of his blade, and thus relieved I had little difficulty with the
others.
Once together, we stood almost back to back against the great boulder,
and thus the creatures were prevented from soaring above us to deliver
their deadly blows, and as we were easily their match while they
remained upon the ground, we were making great headway in dispatching
what remained of them when our attention was again attracted by the
shrill wail of the caller above our heads.
This time I glanced up, and far above us upon a little natural balcony
on the face of the cliff stood a strange figure of a man shrieking out
his shrill signal, the while he waved one hand in the direction of the
river’s mouth as though beckoning to some one there, and with the other
pointed and gesticulated toward us.
A glance in the direction toward which he was looking was sufficient to
apprise me of his aims and at the same time to fill me with the dread
of dire apprehension, for, streaming in from all directions across the
meadow, from out of the forest, and from the far distance of the flat
land across the river, I could see converging upon us a hundred
different lines of wildly leaping creatures such as we were now engaged
with, and with them some strange new monsters which ran with great
swiftness, now erect and now upon all fours.
“It will be a great death,” I said to my companion. “Look!”
As he shot a quick glance in the direction I indicated he smiled.
“We may at least die fighting and as great warriors should, John
Carter,” he replied.
We had just finished the last of our immediate antagonists as he spoke,
and I turned in surprised wonderment at the sound of my name.
And there before my astonished eyes I beheld the greatest of the green
men of Barsoom; their shrewdest statesman, their mightiest general, my
great and good friend, Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark.
CHAPTER II
A FOREST BATTLE
Tars Tarkas and I found no time for an exchange of experiences as we
stood there before the great boulder surrounded by the corpses of our
grotesque assailants, for from all directions down the broad valley was
streaming a perfect torrent of terrifying creatures in response to the
weird call of the strange figure far above us.
“Come,” cried Tars Tarkas, “we must make for the cliffs. There lies our
only hope of even temporary escape; there we may find a cave or a
narrow ledge which two may defend for ever against this motley, unarmed
horde.”
Together we raced across the scarlet sward, I timing my speed that I
might not outdistance my slower companion. We had, perhaps, three
hundred yards to cover between our boulder and the cliffs, and then to
search out a suitable shelter for our stand against the terrifying
things that were pursuing us.
They were rapidly overhauling us when Tars Tarkas cried to me to hasten
ahead and discover, if possible, the sanctuary we sought. The
suggestion was a good one, for thus many valuable minutes might be
saved to us, and, throwing every ounce of my earthly muscles into the
effort, I cleared the remaining distance between myself and the cliffs
in great leaps and bounds that put me at their base in a moment.
The cliffs rose perpendicular directly from the almost level sward of
the valley. There was no accumulation of fallen debris, forming a more
or less rough ascent to them, as is the case with nearly all other
cliffs I have ever seen. The scattered boulders that had fallen from
above and lay upon or partly buried in the turf, were the only
indication that any disintegration of the massive, towering pile of
rocks ever had taken place.
My first cursory inspection of the face of the cliffs filled my heart
with forebodings, since nowhere could I discern, except where the weird
herald stood still shrieking his shrill summons, the faintest
indication of even a bare foothold upon the lofty escarpment.
To my right the bottom of the cliff was lost in the dense foliage of
the forest, which terminated at its very foot, rearing its gorgeous
foliage fully a thousand feet against its stern and forbidding
neighbour.
To the left the cliff ran, apparently unbroken, across the head of the
broad valley, to be lost in the outlines of what appeared to be a range
of mighty mountains that skirted and confined the valley in every
direction.
Perhaps a thousand feet from me the river broke, as it seemed, directly
from the base of the cliffs, and as there seemed not the remotest
chance for escape in that direction I turned my attention again toward
the forest.
The cliffs towered above me a good five thousand feet. The sun was not
quite upon them and they loomed a dull yellow in their own shade. Here
and there they were broken with streaks and patches of dusky red,
green, and occasional areas of white quartz.
Altogether they were very beautiful, but I fear that I did not regard
them with a particularly appreciative eye on this, my first inspection
of them.
Just then I was absorbed in them only as a medium of escape, and so, as
my gaze ran quickly, time and again, over their vast expanse in search
of some cranny or crevice, I came suddenly to loathe them as the
prisoner must loathe the cruel and impregnable walls of his dungeon.
Tars Tarkas was approaching me rapidly, and still more rapidly came the
awful horde at his heels.
It seemed the forest now or nothing, and I was just on the point of
motioning Tars Tarkas to follow me in that direction when the sun
passed the cliff’s zenith, and as the bright rays touched the dull
surface it burst out into a million scintillant lights of burnished
gold, of flaming red, of soft greens, and gleaming whites—a more
gorgeous and inspiring spectacle human eye has never rested upon.
The face of the entire cliff was, as later inspection conclusively
proved, so shot with veins and patches of solid gold as to quite
present the appearance of a solid wall of that precious metal except
where it was broken by outcroppings of ruby, emerald, and diamond
boulders—a faint and alluring indication of the vast and unguessable
riches which lay deeply buried behind the magnificent surface.
But what caught my most interested attention at the moment that the
sun’s rays set the cliff’s face a-shimmer, was the several black spots
which now appeared quite plainly in evidence high across the gorgeous
wall close to the forest’s top, and extending apparently below and
behind the branches.
Almost immediately I recognised them for what they were, the dark
openings of caves entering the solid walls—possible avenues of escape
or temporary shelter, could we but reach them.
There was but a single way, and that led through the mighty, towering
trees upon our right. That I could scale them I knew full well, but
Tars Tarkas, with his mighty bulk and enormous weight, would find it a
task possibly quite beyond his prowess or his skill, for Martians are
at best but poor climbers. Upon the entire surface of that ancient
planet I never before had seen a hill or mountain that exceeded four
thousand feet in height above the dead sea bottoms, and as the ascent
was usually gradual, nearly to their summits they presented but few
opportunities for the practice of climbing. Nor would the Martians have
embraced even such opportunities as might present themselves, for they
could always find a circuitous route about the base of any eminence,
and these roads they preferred and followed in preference to the
shorter but more arduous ways.
However, there was nothing else to consider than an attempt to scale
the trees contiguous to the cliff in an effort to reach the caves
above.
The Thark grasped the possibilities and the difficulties of the plan at
once, but there was no alternative, and so we set out rapidly for the
trees nearest the cliff.
Our relentless pursuers were now close to us, so close that it seemed
that it would be an utter impossibility for the Jeddak of Thark to
reach the forest in advance of them, nor was there any considerable
will in the efforts that Tars Tarkas made, for the green men of Barsoom
do not relish flight, nor ever before had I seen one fleeing from death
in whatsoever form it might have confronted him. But that Tars Tarkas
was the bravest of the brave he had proven thousands of times; yes,
tens of thousands in countless mortal combats with men and beasts. And
so I knew that there was another reason than fear of death behind his
flight, as he knew that a greater power than pride or honour spurred me
to escape these fierce destroyers. In my case it was love—love of the
divine Dejah Thoris; and the cause of the Thark’s great and sudden love
of life I could not fathom, for it is oftener that they seek death than
life—these strange, cruel, loveless, unhappy people.
At length, however, we reached the shadows of the forest, while right
behind us sprang the swiftest of our pursuers—a giant plant man with
claws outreaching to fasten his bloodsucking mouths upon us.
He was, I should say, a hundred yards in advance of his closest
companion, and so I called to Tars Tarkas to ascend a great tree that
brushed the cliff’s face while I dispatched the fellow, thus giving the
less agile Thark an opportunity to reach the higher branches before the
entire horde should be upon us and every vestige of escape cut off.
But I had reckoned without a just appreciation either of the cunning of
my immediate antagonist or the swiftness with which his fellows were
covering the distance which had separated them from me.
As I raised my long-sword to deal the creature its death thrust it
halted in its charge and, as my sword cut harmlessly through the empty
air, the great tail of the thing swept with the power of a grizzly’s
arm across the sward and carried me bodily from my feet to the ground.
In an instant the brute was upon me, but ere it could fasten its
hideous mouths into my breast and throat I grasped a writhing tentacle
in either hand.
The plant man was well muscled, heavy, and powerful but my earthly
sinews and greater agility, in conjunction with the deathly strangle
hold I had upon him, would have given me, I think, an eventual victory
had we had time to discuss the merits of our relative prowess
uninterrupted. But as we strained and struggled about the tree into
which Tars Tarkas was clambering with infinite difficulty, I suddenly
caught a glimpse over the shoulder of my antagonist of the great swarm
of pursuers that now were fairly upon me.
Now, at last, I saw the nature of the other monsters who had come with
the plant men in response to the weird calling of the man upon the
cliff’s face. They were that most dreaded of Martian creatures—great
white apes of Barsoom.
My former experiences upon Mars had familiarized me thoroughly with
them and their methods, and I may say that of all the fearsome and
terrible, weird and grotesque inhabitants of that strange world, it is
the white apes that come nearest to familiarizing me with the sensation
of fear.
I think that the cause of this feeling which these apes engender within
me is due to their remarkable resemblance in form to our Earth men,
which gives them a human appearance that is most uncanny when coupled
with their enormous size.
They stand fifteen feet in height and walk erect upon their hind feet.
Like the green Martians, they have an intermediary set of arms midway
between their upper and lower limbs. Their eyes are very close set, but
do not protrude as do those of the green men of Mars; their ears are
high set, but more laterally located than are the green men’s, while
their snouts and teeth are much like those of our African gorilla. Upon
their heads grows an enormous shock of bristly hair.
It was into the eyes of such as these and the terrible plant men that I
gazed above the shoulder of my foe, and then, in a mighty wave of
snarling, snapping, screaming, purring rage, they swept over me—and of
all the sounds that assailed my ears as I went down beneath them, to me
the most hideous was the horrid purring of the plant men.
Instantly a score of cruel fangs and keen talons were sunk into my
flesh; cold, sucking lips fastened themselves upon my arteries. I
struggled to free myself, and even though weighed down by these immense
bodies, I succeeded in struggling to my feet, where, still grasping my
long-sword, and shortening my grip upon it until I could use it as a
dagger, I wrought such havoc among them that at one time I stood for an
instant free.
What it has taken minutes to write occurred in but a few seconds, but
during that time Tars Tarkas had seen my plight and had dropped from
the lower branches, which he had reached with such infinite labour, and
as I flung the last of my immediate antagonists from me the great Thark
leaped to my side, and again we fought, back to back, as we had done a
hundred times before.
Time and again the ferocious apes sprang in to close with us, and time
and again we beat them back with our swords. The great tails of the
plant men lashed with tremendous power about us as they charged from
various directions or sprang with the agility of greyhounds above our
heads; but every attack met a gleaming blade in sword hands that had
been reputed for twenty years the best that Mars ever had known; for
Tars Tarkas and John Carter were names that the fighting men of the
world of warriors loved best to speak.
But even the two best swords in a world of fighters can avail not for
ever against overwhelming numbers of fierce and savage brutes that know
not what defeat means until cold steel teaches their hearts no longer
to beat, and so, step by step, we were forced back. At length we stood
against the giant tree that we had chosen for our ascent, and then, as
charge after charge hurled its weight upon us, we gave back again and
again, until we had been forced half-way around the huge base of the
colossal trunk.
Tars Tarkas was in the lead, and suddenly I heard a little cry of
exultation from him.
“Here is shelter for one at least, John Carter,” he said, and, glancing
down, I saw an opening in the base of the tree about three feet in
diameter.
“In with you, Tars Tarkas,” I cried, but he would not go; saying that
his bulk was too great for the little aperture, while I might slip in
easily.
“We shall both die if we remain without, John Carter; here is a slight
chance for one of us. Take it and you may live to avenge me, it is
useless for me to attempt to worm my way into so small an opening with
this horde of demons besetting us on all sides.”
“Then we shall die together, Tars Tarkas,” I replied, “for I shall not
go first. Let me defend the opening while you get in, then my smaller
stature will permit me to slip in with you before they can prevent.”
We still were fighting furiously as we talked in broken sentences,
punctured with vicious cuts and thrusts at our swarming enemy.
At length he yielded, for it seemed the only way in which either of us
might be saved from the ever-increasing numbers of our assailants, who
were still swarming upon us from all directions across the broad
valley.
“It was ever your way, John Carter, to think last of your own life,” he
said; “but still more your way to command the lives and actions of
others, even to the greatest of Jeddaks who rule upon Barsoom.”
There was a grim smile upon his cruel, hard face, as he, the greatest
Jeddak of them all, turned to obey the dictates of a creature of
another world—of a man whose stature was less than half his own.
“If you fail, John Carter,” he said, “know that the cruel and heartless
Thark, to whom you taught the meaning of friendship, will come out to
die beside you.”
“As you will, my friend,” I replied; “but quickly now, head first,
while I cover your retreat.”
He hesitated a little at that word, for never before in his whole life
of continual strife had he turned his back upon aught than a dead or
defeated enemy.
“Haste, Tars Tarkas,” I urged, “or we shall both go down to profitless
defeat; I cannot hold them for ever alone.”
As he dropped to the ground to force his way into the tree, the whole
howling pack of hideous devils hurled themselves upon me. To right and
left flew my shimmering blade, now green with the sticky juice of a
plant man, now red with the crimson blood of a great white ape; but
always flying from one opponent to another, hesitating but the barest
fraction of a second to drink the lifeblood in the centre of some
savage heart.
And thus I fought as I never had fought before, against such frightful
odds that I cannot realize even now that human muscles could have
withstood that awful onslaught, that terrific weight of hurtling tons
of ferocious, battling flesh.
With the fear that we would escape them, the creatures redoubled their
efforts to pull me down, and though the ground about me was piled high
with their dead and dying comrades, they succeeded at last in
overwhelming me, and I went down beneath them for the second time that
day, and once again felt those awful sucking lips against my flesh.
But scarce had I fallen ere I felt powerful hands grip my ankles, and
in another second I was being drawn within the shelter of the tree’s
interior. For a moment it was a tug of war between Tars Tarkas and a
great plant man, who clung tenaciously to my breast, but presently I
got the point of my long-sword beneath him and with a mighty thrust
pierced his vitals.
Torn and bleeding from many cruel wounds, I lay panting upon the ground
within the hollow of the tree, while Tars Tarkas defended the opening
from the furious mob without.
For an hour they howled about the tree, but after a few attempts to
reach us they confined their efforts to terrorizing shrieks and
screams, to horrid growling on the part of the great white apes, and
the fearsome and indescribable purring by the plant men.
At length, all but a score, who had apparently been left to prevent our
escape, had left us, and our adventure seemed destined to result in a
siege, the only outcome of which could be our death by starvation; for
even should we be able to slip out after dark, whither in this unknown
and hostile valley could we hope to turn our steps toward possible
escape?
As the attacks of our enemies ceased and our eyes became accustomed to
the semi-darkness of the interior of our strange retreat, I took the
opportunity to explore our shelter.
The tree was hollow to an extent of about fifty feet in diameter, and
from its flat, hard floor I judged that it had often been used to
domicile others before our occupancy. As I raised my eyes toward its
roof to note the height I saw far above me a faint glow of light.
There was an opening above. If we could but reach it we might still
hope to make the shelter of the cliff caves. My eyes had now become
quite used to the subdued light of the interior, and as I pursued my
investigation I presently came upon a rough ladder at the far side of
the cave.
Quickly I mounted it, only to find that it connected at the top with
the lower of a series of horizontal wooden bars that spanned the now
narrow and shaft-like interior of the tree’s stem. These bars were set
one above another about three feet apart, and formed a perfect ladder
as far above me as I could see.
Dropping to the floor once more, I detailed my discovery to Tars
Tarkas, who suggested that I explore aloft as far as I could go in
safety while he guarded the entrance against a possible attack.
As I hastened above to explore the strange shaft I found that the
ladder of horizontal bars mounted always as far above me as my eyes
could reach, and as I ascended, the light from above grew brighter and
brighter.
For fully five hundred feet I continued to climb, until at length I
reached the opening in the stem which admitted the light. It was of
about the same diameter as the entrance at the foot of the tree, and
opened directly upon a large flat limb, the well worn surface of which
testified to its long continued use as an avenue for some creature to
and from this remarkable shaft.
I did not venture out upon the limb for fear that I might be discovered
and our retreat in this direction cut off; but instead hurried to
retrace my steps to Tars Tarkas.
I soon reached him and presently we were both ascending the long ladder
toward the opening above.
Tars Tarkas went in advance and as I reached the first of the
horizontal bars I drew the ladder up after me and, handing it to him,
he carried it a hundred feet further aloft, where he wedged it safely
between one of the bars and the side of the shaft. In like manner I
dislodged the lower bars as I passed them, so that we soon had the
interior of the tree denuded of all possible means of ascent for a
distance of a hundred feet from the base; thus precluding possible
pursuit and attack from the rear.
As we were to learn later, this precaution saved us from dire
predicament, and was eventually the means of our salvation.
When we reached the opening at the top Tars Tarkas drew to one side
that I might pass out and investigate, as, owing to my lesser weight
and greater agility, I was better fitted for the perilous threading of
this dizzy, hanging pathway.
The limb upon which I found myself ascended at a slight angle toward
the cliff, and as I followed it I found that it terminated a few feet
above a narrow ledge which protruded from the cliff’s face at the
entrance to a narrow cave.
As I approached the slightly more slender extremity of the branch it
bent beneath my weight until, as I balanced perilously upon its outer
tip, it swayed gently on a level with the ledge at a distance of a
couple of feet.
Five hundred feet below me lay the vivid scarlet carpet of the valley;
nearly five thousand feet above towered the mighty, gleaming face of
the gorgeous cliffs.
The cave that I faced was not one of those that I had seen from the
ground, and which lay much higher, possibly a thousand feet. But so far
as I might know it was as good for our purpose as another, and so I
returned to the tree for Tars Tarkas.
Together we wormed our way along the waving pathway, but when we
reached the end of the branch we found that our combined weight so
depressed the limb that the cave’s mouth was now too far above us to be
reached.
We finally agreed that Tars Tarkas should return along the branch,
leaving his longest leather harness strap with me, and that when the
limb had risen to a height that would permit me to enter the cave I was
to do so, and on Tars Tarkas’ return I could then lower the strap and
haul him up to the safety of the ledge.
This we did without mishap and soon found ourselves together upon the
verge of a dizzy little balcony, with a magnificent view of the valley
spreading out below us.
As far as the eye could reach gorgeous forest and crimson sward skirted
a silent sea, and about all towered the brilliant monster guardian
cliffs. Once we thought we discerned a gilded minaret gleaming in the
sun amidst the waving tops of far-distant trees, but we soon abandoned
the idea in the belief that it was but an hallucination born of our
great desire to discover the haunts of civilized men in this beautiful,
yet forbidding, spot.
Below us upon the river’s bank the great white apes were devouring the
last remnants of Tars Tarkas’ former companions, while great herds of
plant men grazed in ever-widening circles about the sward which they
kept as close clipped as the smoothest of lawns.
Knowing that attack from the tree was now improbable, we determined to
explore the cave, which we had every reason to believe was but a
continuation of the path we had already traversed, leading the gods
alone knew where, but quite evidently away from this valley of grim
ferocity.
As we advanced we found a well-proportioned tunnel cut from the solid
cliff. Its walls rose some twenty feet above the floor, which was about
five feet in width. The roof was arched. We had no means of making a
light, and so groped our way slowly into the ever-increasing darkness,
Tars Tarkas keeping in touch with one wall while I felt along the
other, while, to prevent our wandering into diverging branches and
becoming separated or lost in some intricate and labyrinthine maze, we
clasped hands.
How far we traversed the tunnel in this manner I do not know, but
presently we came to an obstruction which blocked our further progress.
It seemed more like a partition than a sudden ending of the cave, for
it was constructed not of the material of the cliff, but of something
which felt like very hard wood.
Silently I groped over its surface with my hands, and presently was
rewarded by the feel of the button which as commonly denotes a door on
Mars as does a door knob on Earth.
Gently pressing it, I had the satisfaction of feeling the door slowly
give before me, and in another instant we were looking into a dimly
lighted apartment, which, so far as we could see, was unoccupied.
Without more ado I swung the door wide open and, followed by the huge
Thark, stepped into the chamber. As we stood for a moment in silence
gazing about the room a slight noise behind caused me to turn quickly,
when, to my astonishment, I saw the door close with a sharp click as
though by an unseen hand.
Instantly I sprang toward it to wrench it open again, for something in
the uncanny movement of the thing and the tense and almost palpable
silence of the chamber seemed to portend a lurking evil lying hidden in
this rock-bound chamber within the bowels of the Golden Cliffs.
My fingers clawed futilely at the unyielding portal, while my eyes
sought in vain for a duplicate of the button which had given us
ingress.
And then, from unseen lips, a cruel and mocking peal of laughter rang
through the desolate place.
CHAPTER III
THE CHAMBER OF MYSTERY
For moments after that awful laugh had ceased reverberating through the
rocky room, Tars Tarkas and I stood in tense and expectant silence. But
no further sound broke the stillness, nor within the range of our
vision did aught move.
At length Tars Tarkas laughed softly, after the manner of his strange
kind when in the presence of the horrible or terrifying. It is not an
hysterical laugh, but rather the genuine expression of the pleasure
they derive from the things that move Earth men to loathing or to
tears.
Often and again have I seen them roll upon the ground in mad fits of
uncontrollable mirth when witnessing the death agonies of women and
little children beneath the torture of that hellish green Martian
fete—the Great Games.
I looked up at the Thark, a smile upon my own lips, for here in truth
was greater need for a smiling face than a trembling chin.
“What do you make of it all?” I asked. “Where in the deuce are we?”
He looked at me in surprise.
“Where are we?” he repeated. “Do you tell me, John Carter, that you
know not where you be?”
“That I am upon Barsoom is all that I can guess, and but for you and
the great white apes I should not even guess that, for the sights I
have seen this day are as unlike the things of my beloved Barsoom as I
knew it ten long years ago as they are unlike the world of my birth.
“No, Tars Tarkas, I know not where we be.”
“Where have you been since you opened the mighty portals of the
atmosphere plant years ago, after the keeper had died and the engines
stopped and all Barsoom was dying, that had not already died, of
asphyxiation? Your body even was never found, though the men of a whole
world sought after it for years, though the Jeddak of Helium and his
granddaughter, your princess, offered such fabulous rewards that even
princes of royal blood joined in the search.
“There was but one conclusion to reach when all efforts to locate you
had failed, and that, that you had taken the long, last pilgrimage down
the mysterious River Iss, to await in the Valley Dor upon the shores of
the Lost Sea of Korus the beautiful Dejah Thoris, your princess.
“Why you had gone none could guess, for your princess still lived—”
“Thank God,” I interrupted him. “I did not dare to ask you, for I
feared I might have been too late to save her—she was very low when I
left her in the royal gardens of Tardos Mors that long-gone night; so
very low that I scarcely hoped even then to reach the atmosphere plant
ere her dear spirit had fled from me for ever. And she lives yet?”
“She lives, John Carter.”
“You have not told me where we are,” I reminded him.
“We are where I expected to find you, John Carter—and another. Many
years ago you heard the story of the woman who taught me the thing that
green Martians are reared to hate, the woman who taught me to love. You
know the cruel tortures and the awful death her love won for her at the
hands of the beast, Tal Hajus.
“She, I thought, awaited me by the Lost Sea of Korus.
“You know that it was left for a man from another world, for yourself,
John Carter, to teach this cruel Thark what friendship is; and you, I
thought, also roamed the care-free Valley Dor.
“Thus were the two I most longed for at the end of the long pilgrimage
I must take some day, and so as the time had elapsed which Dejah Thoris
had hoped might bring you once more to her side, for she has always
tried to believe that you had but temporarily returned to your own
planet, I at last gave way to my great yearning and a month since I
started upon the journey, the end of which you have this day witnessed.
Do you understand now where you be, John Carter?”
“And that was the River Iss, emptying into the Lost Sea of Korus in the
Valley Dor?” I asked.
“This is the valley of love and peace and rest to which every
Barsoomian since time immemorial has longed to pilgrimage at the end of
a life of hate and strife and bloodshed,” he replied. “This, John
Carter, is Heaven.”
His tone was cold and ironical; its bitterness but reflecting the
terrible disappointment he had suffered. Such a fearful
disillusionment, such a blasting of life-long hopes and aspirations,
such an uprooting of age-old tradition might have excused a vastly
greater demonstration on the part of the Thark.
I laid my hand upon his shoulder.
“I am sorry,” I said, nor did there seem aught else to say.
“Think, John Carter, of the countless billions of Barsoomians who have
taken the voluntary pilgrimage down this cruel river since the
beginning of time, only to fall into the ferocious clutches of the
terrible creatures that to-day assailed us.
“There is an ancient legend that once a red man returned from the banks
of the Lost Sea of Korus, returned from the Valley Dor, back through
the mysterious River Iss, and the legend has it that he narrated a
fearful blasphemy of horrid brutes that inhabited a valley of wondrous
loveliness, brutes that pounced upon each Barsoomian as he terminated
his pilgrimage and devoured him upon the banks of the Lost Sea where he
had looked to find love and peace and happiness; but the ancients
killed the blasphemer, as tradition has ordained that any shall be
killed who return from the bosom of the River of Mystery.
“But now we know that it was no blasphemy, that the legend is a true
one, and that the man told only of what he saw; but what does it profit
us, John Carter, since even should we escape, we also would be treated
as blasphemers? We are between the wild thoat of certainty and the mad
zitidar of fact—we can escape neither.”
“As Earth men say, we are between the devil and the deep sea, Tars
Tarkas,” I replied, nor could I help but smile at our dilemma.
“There is naught that we can do but take things as they come, and at
least have the satisfaction of knowing that whoever slays us eventually
will have far greater numbers of their own dead to count than they will
get in return. White ape or plant man, green Barsoomian or red man,
whosoever it shall be that takes the last toll from us will know that
it is costly in lives to wipe out John Carter, Prince of the House of
Tardos Mors, and Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark, at the same time.”
I could not help but laugh at his grim humour, and he joined in with me
in one of those rare laughs of real enjoyment which was one of the
attributes of this fierce Tharkian chief which marked him from the
others of his kind.
“But about yourself, John Carter,” he cried at last. “If you have not
been here all these years where indeed have you been, and how is it
that I find you here to-day?”
“I have been back to Earth,” I replied. “For ten long Earth years I
have been praying and hoping for the day that would carry me once more
to this grim old planet of yours, for which, with all its cruel and
terrible customs, I feel a bond of sympathy and love even greater than
for the world that gave me birth.
“For ten years have I been enduring a living death of uncertainty and
doubt as to whether Dejah Thoris lived, and now that for the first time
in all these years my prayers have been answered and my doubt relieved
I find myself, through a cruel whim of fate, hurled into the one tiny
spot of all Barsoom from which there is apparently no escape, and if
there were, at a price which would put out for ever the last flickering
hope which I may cling to of seeing my princess again in this life—and
you have seen to-day with what pitiful futility man yearns toward a
material hereafter.
“Only a bare half-hour before I saw you battling with the plant men I
was standing in the moonlight upon the banks of a broad river that taps
the eastern shore of Earth’s most blessed land. I have answered you, my
friend. Do you believe?”
“I believe,” replied Tars Tarkas, “though I cannot understand.”
As we talked I had been searching the interior of the chamber with my
eyes. It was, perhaps, two hundred feet in length and half as broad,
with what appeared to be a doorway in the centre of the wall directly
opposite that through which we had entered.
The apartment was hewn from the material of the cliff, showing mostly
dull gold in the dim light which a single minute radium illuminator in
the centre of the roof diffused throughout its great dimensions. Here
and there polished surfaces of ruby, emerald, and diamond patched the
golden walls and ceiling. The floor was of another material, very hard,
and worn by much use to the smoothness of glass. Aside from the two
doors I could discern no sign of other aperture, and as one we knew to
be locked against us I approached the other.
As I extended my hand to search for the controlling button, that cruel
and mocking laugh rang out once more, so close to me this time that I
involuntarily shrank back, tightening my grip upon the hilt of my great
sword.
And then from the far corner of the great chamber a hollow voice
chanted: “There is no hope, there is no hope; the dead return not, the
dead return not; nor is there any resurrection. Hope not, for there is
no hope.”
Though our eyes instantly turned toward the spot from which the voice
seemed to emanate, there was no one in sight, and I must admit that
cold shivers played along my spine and the short hairs at the base of
my head stiffened and rose up, as do those upon a hound’s neck when in
the night his eyes see those uncanny things which are hidden from the
sight of man.
Quickly I walked toward the mournful voice, but it had ceased ere I
reached the further wall, and then from the other end of the chamber
came another voice, shrill and piercing:
“Fools! Fools!” it shrieked. “Thinkest thou to defeat the eternal laws
of life and death? Wouldst cheat the mysterious Issus, Goddess of
Death, of her just dues? Did not her mighty messenger, the ancient Iss,
bear you upon her leaden bosom at your own behest to the Valley Dor?
“Thinkest thou, O fools, that Issus wilt give up her own? Thinkest thou
to escape from whence in all the countless ages but a single soul has
fled?
“Go back the way thou camest, to the merciful maws of the children of
the Tree of Life or the gleaming fangs of the great white apes, for
there lies speedy surcease from suffering; but insist in your rash
purpose to thread the mazes of the Golden Cliffs of the Mountains of
Otz, past the ramparts of the impregnable fortresses of the Holy
Therns, and upon your way Death in its most frightful form will
overtake you—a death so horrible that even the Holy Therns themselves,
who conceived both Life and Death, avert their eyes from its
fiendishness and close their ears against the hideous shrieks of its
victims.
“Go back, O fools, the way thou camest.”
And then the awful laugh broke out from another part of the chamber.
“Most uncanny,” I remarked, turning to Tars Tarkas.
“What shall we do?” he asked. “We cannot fight empty air; I would
almost sooner return and face foes into whose flesh I may feel my blade
bite and know that I am selling my carcass dearly before I go down to
that eternal oblivion which is evidently the fairest and most desirable
eternity that mortal man has the right to hope for.”
“If, as you say, we cannot fight empty air, Tars Tarkas,” I replied,
“neither, on the other hand, can empty air fight us. I, who have faced
and conquered in my time thousands of sinewy warriors and tempered
blades, shall not be turned back by wind; nor no more shall you,
Thark.”
“But unseen voices may emanate from unseen and unseeable creatures who
wield invisible blades,” answered the green warrior.
“Rot, Tars Tarkas,” I cried, “those voices come from beings as real as
you or as I. In their veins flows lifeblood that may be let as easily
as ours, and the fact that they remain invisible to us is the best
proof to my mind that they are mortal; nor overly courageous mortals at
that. Think you, Tars Tarkas, that John Carter will fly at the first
shriek of a cowardly foe who dare not come out into the open and face a
good blade?”
I had spoken in a loud voice that there might be no question that our
would-be terrorizers should hear me, for I was tiring of this
nerve-racking fiasco. It had occurred to me, too, that the whole
business was but a plan to frighten us back into the valley of death
from which we had escaped, that we might be quickly disposed of by the
savage creatures there.
For a long period there was silence, then of a sudden a soft, stealthy
sound behind me caused me to turn suddenly to behold a great
many-legged banth creeping sinuously upon me.
The banth is a fierce beast of prey that roams the low hills
surrounding the dead seas of ancient Mars. Like nearly all Martian
animals it is almost hairless, having only a great bristly mane about
its thick neck.
Its long, lithe body is supported by ten powerful legs, its enormous
jaws are equipped, like those of the calot, or Martian hound, with
several rows of long needle-like fangs; its mouth reaches to a point
far back of its tiny ears, while its enormous, protruding eyes of green
add the last touch of terror to its awful aspect.
As it crept toward me it lashed its powerful tail against its yellow
sides, and when it saw that it was discovered it emitted the terrifying
roar which often freezes its prey into momentary paralysis in the
instant that it makes its spring.
And so it launched its great bulk toward me, but its mighty voice had
held no paralysing terrors for me, and it met cold steel instead of the
tender flesh its cruel jaws gaped so widely to engulf.
An instant later I drew my blade from the still heart of this great
Barsoomian lion, and turning toward Tars Tarkas was surprised to see
him facing a similar monster.
No sooner had he dispatched his than I, turning, as though drawn by the
instinct of my guardian subconscious mind, beheld another of the savage
denizens of the Martian wilds leaping across the chamber toward me.
From then on for the better part of an hour one hideous creature after
another was launched upon us, springing apparently from the empty air
about us.
Tars Tarkas was satisfied; here was something tangible that he could
cut and slash with his great blade, while I, for my part, may say that
the diversion was a marked improvement over the uncanny voices from
unseen lips.
That there was nothing supernatural about our new foes was well
evidenced by their howls of rage and pain as they felt the sharp steel
at their vitals, and the very real blood which flowed from their
severed arteries as they died the real death.
I noticed during the period of this new persecution that the beasts
appeared only when our backs were turned; we never saw one really
materialize from thin air, nor did I for an instant sufficiently lose
my excellent reasoning faculties to be once deluded into the belief
that the beasts came into the room other than through some concealed
and well-contrived doorway.
Among the ornaments of Tars Tarkas’ leather harness, which is the only
manner of clothing worn by Martians other than silk capes and robes of
silk and fur for protection from the cold after dark, was a small
mirror, about the bigness of a lady’s hand glass, which hung midway
between his shoulders and his waist against his broad back.
Once as he stood looking down at a newly fallen antagonist my eyes
happened to fall upon this mirror and in its shiny surface I saw
pictured a sight that caused me to whisper:
“Move not, Tars Tarkas! Move not a muscle!”
He did not ask why, but stood like a graven image while my eyes watched
the strange thing that meant so much to us.
What I saw was the quick movement of a section of the wall behind me.
It was turning upon pivots, and with it a section of the floor directly
in front of it was turning. It was as though you placed a visiting-card
upon end on a silver dollar that you had laid flat upon a table, so
that the edge of the card perfectly bisected the surface of the coin.
The card might represent the section of the wall that turned and the
silver dollar the section of the floor. Both were so nicely fitted into
the adjacent portions of the floor and wall that no crack had been
noticeable in the dim light of the chamber.
As the turn was half completed a great beast was revealed sitting upon
its haunches upon that part of the revolving floor that had been on the
opposite side before the wall commenced to move; when the section
stopped, the beast was facing toward me on our side of the partition—it
was very simple.
But what had interested me most was the sight that the half-turned
section had presented through the opening that it had made. A great
chamber, well lighted, in which were several men and women chained to
the wall, and in front of them, evidently directing and operating the
movement of the secret doorway, a wicked-faced man, neither red as are
the red men of Mars, nor green as are the green men, but white, like
myself, with a great mass of flowing yellow hair.
The prisoners behind him were red Martians. Chained with them were a
number of fierce beasts, such as had been turned upon us, and others
equally as ferocious.
As I turned to meet my new foe it was with a heart considerably
lightened.
“Watch the wall at your end of the chamber, Tars Tarkas,” I cautioned,
“it is through secret doorways in the wall that the brutes are loosed
upon us.” I was very close to him and spoke in a low whisper that my
knowledge of their secret might not be disclosed to our tormentors.
As long as we remained each facing an opposite end of the apartment no
further attacks were made upon us, so it was quite clear to me that the
partitions were in some way pierced that our actions might be observed
from without.
At length a plan of action occurred to me, and backing quite close to
Tars Tarkas I unfolded my scheme in a low whisper, keeping my eyes
still glued upon my end of the room.
The great Thark grunted his assent to my proposition when I had done,
and in accordance with my plan commenced backing toward the wall which
I faced while I advanced slowly ahead of him.
When we had reached a point some ten feet from the secret doorway I
halted my companion, and cautioning him to remain absolutely motionless
until I gave the prearranged signal I quickly turned my back to the
door through which I could almost feel the burning and baleful eyes of
our would be executioner.
Instantly my own eyes sought the mirror upon Tars Tarkas’ back and in
another second I was closely watching the section of the wall which had
been disgorging its savage terrors upon us.
I had not long to wait, for presently the golden surface commenced to
move rapidly. Scarcely had it started than I gave the signal to Tars
Tarkas, simultaneously springing for the receding half of the pivoting
door. In like manner the Thark wheeled and leaped for the opening being
made by the inswinging section.
A single bound carried me completely through into the adjoining room
and brought me face to face with the fellow whose cruel face I had seen
before. He was about my own height and well muscled and in every
outward detail moulded precisely as are Earth men.
At his side hung a long-sword, a short-sword, a dagger, and one of the
destructive radium revolvers that are common upon Mars.
The fact that I was armed only with a long-sword, and so according to
the laws and ethics of battle everywhere upon Barsoom should only have
been met with a similar or lesser weapon, seemed to have no effect upon
the moral sense of my enemy, for he whipped out his revolver ere I
scarce had touched the floor by his side, but an uppercut from my
long-sword sent it flying from his grasp before he could discharge it.
Instantly he drew his long-sword, and thus evenly armed we set to in
earnest for one of the closest battles I ever have fought.
The fellow was a marvellous swordsman and evidently in practice, while
I had not gripped the hilt of a sword for ten long years before that
morning.
But it did not take me long to fall easily into my fighting stride, so
that in a few minutes the man began to realize that he had at last met
his match.
His face became livid with rage as he found my guard impregnable, while
blood flowed from a dozen minor wounds upon his face and body.
“Who are you, white man?” he hissed. “That you are no Barsoomian from
the outer world is evident from your colour. And you are not of us.”
His last statement was almost a question.
“What if I were from the Temple of Issus?” I hazarded on a wild guess.
“Fate forfend!” he exclaimed, his face going white under the blood that
now nearly covered it.
I did not know how to follow up my lead, but I carefully laid the idea
away for future use should circumstances require it. His answer
indicated that for all he KNEW I might be from the Temple of Issus and
in it were men like unto myself, and either this man feared the inmates
of the temple or else he held their persons or their power in such
reverence that he trembled to think of the harm and indignities he had
heaped upon one of them.
But my present business with him was of a different nature than that
which requires any considerable abstract reasoning; it was to get my
sword between his ribs, and this I succeeded in doing within the next
few seconds, nor was I an instant too soon.
The chained prisoners had been watching the combat in tense silence;
not a sound had fallen in the room other than the clashing of our
contending blades, the soft shuffling of our naked feet and the few
whispered words we had hissed at each other through clenched teeth the
while we continued our mortal duel.
But as the body of my antagonist sank an inert mass to the floor a cry
of warning broke from one of the female prisoners.
“Turn! Turn! Behind you!” she shrieked, and as I wheeled at the first
note of her shrill cry I found myself facing a second man of the same
race as he who lay at my feet.
The fellow had crept stealthily from a dark corridor and was almost
upon me with raised sword ere I saw him. Tars Tarkas was nowhere in
sight and the secret panel in the wall, through which I had come, was
closed.
How I wished that he were by my side now! I had fought almost
continuously for many hours; I had passed through such experiences and
adventures as must sap the vitality of man, and with all this I had not
eaten for nearly twenty-four hours, nor slept.
I was fagged out, and for the first time in years felt a question as to
my ability to cope with an antagonist; but there was naught else for it
than to engage my man, and that as quickly and ferociously as lay in
me, for my only salvation was to rush him off his feet by the
impetuosity of my attack—I could not hope to win a long-drawn-out
battle.
But the fellow was evidently of another mind, for he backed and parried
and parried and sidestepped until I was almost completely fagged from
the exertion of attempting to finish him.
He was a more adroit swordsman, if possible, than my previous foe, and
I must admit that he led me a pretty chase and in the end came near to
making a sorry fool of me—and a dead one into the bargain.
I could feel myself growing weaker and weaker, until at length objects
commenced to blur before my eyes and I staggered and blundered about
more asleep than awake, and then it was that he worked his pretty
little coup that came near to losing me my life.
He had backed me around so that I stood in front of the corpse of his
fellow, and then he rushed me suddenly so that I was forced back upon
it, and as my heel struck it the impetus of my body flung me backward
across the dead man.
My head struck the hard pavement with a resounding whack, and to that
alone I owe my life, for it cleared my brain and the pain roused my
temper, so that I was equal for the moment to tearing my enemy to
pieces with my bare hands, and I verily believe that I should have
attempted it had not my right hand, in the act of raising my body from
the ground, come in contact with a bit of cold metal.
As the eyes of the layman so is the hand of the fighting man when it
comes in contact with an implement of his vocation, and thus I did not
need to look or reason to know that the dead man’s revolver, lying
where it had fallen when I struck it from his grasp, was at my
disposal.
The fellow whose ruse had put me down was springing toward me, the
point of his gleaming blade directed straight at my heart, and as he
came there rang from his lips the cruel and mocking peal of laughter
that I had heard within the Chamber of Mystery.
And so he died, his thin lips curled in the snarl of his hateful laugh,
and a bullet from the revolver of his dead companion bursting in his
heart.
His body, borne by the impetus of his headlong rush, plunged upon me.
The hilt of his sword must have struck my head, for with the impact of
the corpse I lost consciousness.
CHAPTER IV
THUVIA
It was the sound of conflict that aroused me once more to the realities
of life. For a moment I could neither place my surroundings nor locate
the sounds which had aroused me. And then from beyond the blank wall
beside which I lay I heard the shuffling of feet, the snarling of grim
beasts, the clank of metal accoutrements, and the heavy breathing of a
man.
As I rose to my feet I glanced hurriedly about the chamber in which I
had just encountered such a warm reception. The prisoners and the
savage brutes rested in their chains by the opposite wall eyeing me
with varying expressions of curiosity, sullen rage, surprise, and hope.
The latter emotion seemed plainly evident upon the handsome and
intelligent face of the young red Martian woman whose cry of warning
had been instrumental in saving my life.
She was the perfect type of that remarkably beautiful race whose
outward appearance is identical with the more god-like races of Earth
men, except that this higher race of Martians is of a light reddish
copper colour. As she was entirely unadorned I could not even guess her
station in life, though it was evident that she was either a prisoner
or slave in her present environment.
It was several seconds before the sounds upon the opposite side of the
partition jolted my slowly returning faculties into a realization of
their probable import, and then of a sudden I grasped the fact that
they were caused by Tars Tarkas in what was evidently a desperate
struggle with wild beasts or savage men.
With a cry of encouragement I threw my weight against the secret door,
but as well have assayed the down-hurling of the cliffs themselves.
Then I sought feverishly for the secret of the revolving panel, but my
search was fruitless, and I was about to raise my longsword against the
sullen gold when the young woman prisoner called out to me.
“Save thy sword, O Mighty Warrior, for thou shalt need it more where it
will avail to some purpose—shatter it not against senseless metal which
yields better to the lightest finger touch of one who knows its
secret.”
“Know you the secret of it then?” I asked.
“Yes; release me and I will give you entrance to the other horror
chamber, if you wish. The keys to my fetters are upon the first dead of
thy foemen. But why would you return to face again the fierce banth, or
whatever other form of destruction they have loosed within that awful
trap?”
“Because my friend fights there alone,” I answered, as I hastily sought
and found the keys upon the carcass of the dead custodian of this grim
chamber of horrors.
There were many keys upon the oval ring, but the fair Martian maid
quickly selected that which sprung the great lock at her waist, and
freed she hurried toward the secret panel.
Again she sought out a key upon the ring. This time a slender,
needle-like affair which she inserted in an almost invisible hole in
the wall. Instantly the door swung upon its pivot, and the contiguous
section of the floor upon which I was standing carried me with it into
the chamber where Tars Tarkas fought.
The great Thark stood with his back against an angle of the walls,
while facing him in a semi-circle a half-dozen huge monsters crouched
waiting for an opening. Their blood-streaked heads and shoulders
testified to the cause of their wariness as well as to the
swordsmanship of the green warrior whose glossy hide bore the same mute
but eloquent witness to the ferocity of the attacks that he had so far
withstood.
Sharp talons and cruel fangs had torn leg, arm, and breast literally to
ribbons. So weak was he from continued exertion and loss of blood that
but for the supporting wall I doubt that he even could have stood
erect. But with the tenacity and indomitable courage of his kind he
still faced his cruel and relentless foes—the personification of that
ancient proverb of his tribe: “Leave to a Thark his head and one hand
and he may yet conquer.”
As he saw me enter, a grim smile touched those grim lips of his, but
whether the smile signified relief or merely amusement at the sight of
my own bloody and dishevelled condition I do not know.
As I was about to spring into the conflict with my sharp long-sword I
felt a gentle hand upon my shoulder and turning found, to my surprise,
that the young woman had followed me into the chamber.
“Wait,” she whispered, “leave them to me,” and pushing me advanced, all
defenceless and unarmed, upon the snarling banths.
When quite close to them she spoke a single Martian word in low but
peremptory tones. Like lightning the great beasts wheeled upon her, and
I looked to see her torn to pieces before I could reach her side, but
instead the creatures slunk to her feet like puppies that expect a
merited whipping.
Again she spoke to them, but in tones so low I could not catch the
words, and then she started toward the opposite side of the chamber
with the six mighty monsters trailing at heel. One by one she sent them
through the secret panel into the room beyond, and when the last had
passed from the chamber where we stood in wide-eyed amazement she
turned and smiled at us and then herself passed through, leaving us
alone.
For a moment neither of us spoke. Then Tars Tarkas said:
“I heard the fighting beyond the partition through which you passed,
but I did not fear for you, John Carter, until I heard the report of a
revolver shot. I knew that there lived no man upon all Barsoom who
could face you with naked steel and live, but the shot stripped the
last vestige of hope from me, since you I knew to be without firearms.
Tell me of it.”
I did as he bade, and then together we sought the secret panel through
which I had just entered the apartment—the one at the opposite end of
the room from that through which the girl had led her savage
companions.
To our disappointment the panel eluded our every effort to negotiate
its secret lock. We felt that once beyond it we might look with some
little hope of success for a passage to the outside world.
The fact that the prisoners within were securely chained led us to
believe that surely there must be an avenue of escape from the terrible
creatures which inhabited this unspeakable place.
Again and again we turned from one door to another, from the baffling
golden panel at one end of the chamber to its mate at the other—equally
baffling.
When we had about given up all hope one of the panels turned silently
toward us, and the young woman who had led away the banths stood once
more beside us.
“Who are you?” she asked, “and what your mission, that you have the
temerity to attempt to escape from the Valley Dor and the death you
have chosen?”
“I have chosen no death, maiden,” I replied. “I am not of Barsoom, nor
have I taken yet the voluntary pilgrimage upon the River Iss. My friend
here is Jeddak of all the Tharks, and though he has not yet expressed a
desire to return to the living world, I am taking him with me from the
living lie that hath lured him to this frightful place.
“I am of another world. I am John Carter, Prince of the House of Tardos
Mors, Jeddak of Helium. Perchance some faint rumour of me may have
leaked within the confines of your hellish abode.”
She smiled.
“Yes,” she replied, “naught that passes in the world we have left is
unknown here. I have heard of you, many years ago. The therns have
ofttimes wondered whither you had flown, since you had neither taken
the pilgrimage, nor could be found upon the face of Barsoom.”
“Tell me,” I said, “and who be you, and why a prisoner, yet with power
over the ferocious beasts of the place that denotes familiarity and
authority far beyond that which might be expected of a prisoner or a
slave?”
“Slave I am,” she answered. “For fifteen years a slave in this terrible
place, and now that they have tired of me and become fearful of the
power which my knowledge of their ways has given me I am but recently
condemned to die the death.”
She shuddered.
“What death?” I asked.
“The Holy Therns eat human flesh,” she answered me; “but only that
which has died beneath the sucking lips of a plant man—flesh from which
the defiling blood of life has been drawn. And to this cruel end I have
been condemned. It was to be within a few hours, had your advent not
caused an interruption of their plans.”
“Was it then Holy Therns who felt the weight of John Carter’s hand?” I
asked.
“Oh, no; those whom you laid low are lesser therns; but of the same
cruel and hateful race. The Holy Therns abide upon the outer slopes of
these grim hills, facing the broad world from which they harvest their
victims and their spoils.
“Labyrinthine passages connect these caves with the luxurious palaces
of the Holy Therns, and through them pass upon their many duties the
lesser therns, and hordes of slaves, and prisoners, and fierce beasts;
the grim inhabitants of this sunless world.
“There be within this vast network of winding passages and countless
chambers men, women, and beasts who, born within its dim and gruesome
underworld, have never seen the light of day—nor ever shall.
“They are kept to do the bidding of the race of therns; to furnish at
once their sport and their sustenance.
“Now and again some hapless pilgrim, drifting out upon the silent sea
from the cold Iss, escapes the plant men and the great white apes that
guard the Temple of Issus and falls into the remorseless clutches of
the therns; or, as was my misfortune, is coveted by the Holy Thern who
chances to be upon watch in the balcony above the river where it issues
from the bowels of the mountains through the cliffs of gold to empty
into the Lost Sea of Korus.
“All who reach the Valley Dor are, by custom, the rightful prey of the
plant men and the apes, while their arms and ornaments become the
portion of the therns; but if one escapes the terrible denizens of the
valley for even a few hours the therns may claim such a one as their
own. And again the Holy Thern on watch, should he see a victim he
covets, often tramples upon the rights of the unreasoning brutes of the
valley and takes his prize by foul means if he cannot gain it by fair.
“It is said that occasionally some deluded victim of Barsoomian
superstition will so far escape the clutches of the countless enemies
that beset his path from the moment that he emerges from the
subterranean passage through which the Iss flows for a thousand miles
before it enters the Valley Dor as to reach the very walls of the
Temple of Issus; but what fate awaits one there not even the Holy
Therns may guess, for who has passed within those gilded walls never
has returned to unfold the mysteries they have held since the beginning
of time.
“The Temple of Issus is to the therns what the Valley Dor is imagined
by the peoples of the outer world to be to them; it is the ultimate
haven of peace, refuge, and happiness to which they pass after this
life and wherein an eternity of eternities is spent amidst the delights
of the flesh which appeal most strongly to this race of mental giants
and moral pygmies.”
“The Temple of Issus is, I take it, a heaven within a heaven,” I said.
“Let us hope that there it will be meted to the therns as they have
meted it here unto others.”
“Who knows?” the girl murmured.
“The therns, I judge from what you have said, are no less mortal than
we; and yet have I always heard them spoken of with the utmost awe and
reverence by the people of Barsoom, as one might speak of the gods
themselves.”
“The therns are mortal,” she replied. “They die from the same causes as
you or I might: those who do not live their allotted span of life, one
thousand years, when by the authority of custom they may take their way
in happiness through the long tunnel that leads to Issus.
“Those who die before are supposed to spend the balance of their
allotted time in the image of a plant man, and it is for this reason
that the plant men are held sacred by the therns, since they believe
that each of these hideous creatures was formerly a thern.”
“And should a plant man die?” I asked.
“Should he die before the expiration of the thousand years from the
birth of the thern whose immortality abides within him then the soul
passes into a great white ape, but should the ape die short of the
exact hour that terminates the thousand years the soul is for ever lost
and passes for all eternity into the carcass of the slimy and fearsome
silians whose wriggling thousands seethe the silent sea beneath the
hurtling moons when the sun has gone and strange shapes walk through
the Valley Dor.”
“We sent several Holy Therns to the silians to-day, then,” said Tars
Tarkas, laughing.
“And so will your death be the more terrible when it comes,” said the
maiden. “And come it will—you cannot escape.”
“One has escaped, centuries ago,” I reminded her, “and what has been
done may be done again.”
“It is useless even to try,” she answered hopelessly.
“But try we shall,” I cried, “and you shall go with us, if you wish.”
“To be put to death by mine own people, and render my memory a disgrace
to my family and my nation? A Prince of the House of Tardos Mors should
know better than to suggest such a thing.”
Tars Tarkas listened in silence, but I could feel his eyes riveted upon
me and I knew that he awaited my answer as one might listen to the
reading of his sentence by the foreman of a jury.
What I advised the girl to do would seal our fate as well, since if I
bowed to the inevitable decree of age-old superstition we must all
remain and meet our fate in some horrible form within this awful abode
of horror and cruelty.
“We have the right to escape if we can,” I answered. “Our own moral
senses will not be offended if we succeed, for we know that the fabled
life of love and peace in the blessed Valley of Dor is a rank and
wicked deception. We know that the valley is not sacred; we know that
the Holy Therns are not holy; that they are a race of cruel and
heartless mortals, knowing no more of the real life to come than we do.
“Not only is it our right to bend every effort to escape—it is a solemn
duty from which we should not shrink even though we know that we should
be reviled and tortured by our own peoples when we returned to them.
“Only thus may we carry the truth to those without, and though the
likelihood of our narrative being given credence is, I grant you,
remote, so wedded are mortals to their stupid infatuation for
impossible superstitions, we should be craven cowards indeed were we to
shirk the plain duty which confronts us.
“Again there is a chance that with the weight of the testimony of
several of us the truth of our statements may be accepted, and at least
a compromise effected which will result in the dispatching of an
expedition of investigation to this hideous mockery of heaven.”
Both the girl and the green warrior stood silent in thought for some
moments. The former it was who eventually broke the silence.
“Never had I considered the matter in that light before,” she said.
“Indeed would I give my life a thousand times if I could but save a
single soul from the awful life that I have led in this cruel place.
Yes, you are right, and I will go with you as far as we can go; but I
doubt that we ever shall escape.”
I turned an inquiring glance toward the Thark.
“To the gates of Issus, or to the bottom of Korus,” spoke the green
warrior; “to the snows to the north or to the snows to the south, Tars
Tarkas follows where John Carter leads. I have spoken.”
“Come, then,” I cried, “we must make the start, for we could not be
further from escape than we now are in the heart of this mountain and
within the four walls of this chamber of death.”
“Come, then,” said the girl, “but do not flatter yourself that you can
find no worse place than this within the territory of the therns.”
So saying she swung the secret panel that separated us from the
apartment in which I had found her, and we stepped through once more
into the presence of the other prisoners.
There were in all ten red Martians, men and women, and when we had
briefly explained our plan they decided to join forces with us, though
it was evident that it was with some considerable misgivings that they
thus tempted fate by opposing an ancient superstition, even though each
knew through cruel experience the fallacy of its entire fabric.
Thuvia, the girl whom I had first freed, soon had the others at
liberty. Tars Tarkas and I stripped the bodies of the two therns of
their weapons, which included swords, daggers, and two revolvers of the
curious and deadly type manufactured by the red Martians.
We distributed the weapons as far as they would go among our followers,
giving the firearms to two of the women; Thuvia being one so armed.
With the latter as our guide we set off rapidly but cautiously through
a maze of passages, crossing great chambers hewn from the solid metal
of the cliff, following winding corridors, ascending steep inclines,
and now and again concealing ourselves in dark recesses at the sound of
approaching footsteps.
Our destination, Thuvia said, was a distant storeroom where arms and
ammunition in plenty might be found. From there she was to lead us to
the summit of the cliffs, from where it would require both wondrous wit
and mighty fighting to win our way through the very heart of the
stronghold of the Holy Therns to the world without.
“And even then, O Prince,” she cried, “the arm of the Holy Thern is
long. It reaches to every nation of Barsoom. His secret temples are
hidden in the heart of every community. Wherever we go should we escape
we shall find that word of our coming has preceded us, and death awaits
us before we may pollute the air with our blasphemies.”
We had proceeded for possibly an hour without serious interruption, and
Thuvia had just whispered to me that we were approaching our first
destination, when on entering a great chamber we came upon a man,
evidently a thern.
He wore in addition to his leathern trappings and jewelled ornaments a
great circlet of gold about his brow in the exact centre of which was
set an immense stone, the exact counterpart of that which I had seen
upon the breast of the little old man at the atmosphere plant nearly
twenty years before.
It is the one priceless jewel of Barsoom. Only two are known to exist,
and these were worn as the insignia of their rank and position by the
two old men in whose charge was placed the operation of the great
engines which pump the artificial atmosphere to all parts of Mars from
the huge atmosphere plant, the secret to whose mighty portals placed in
my possession the ability to save from immediate extinction the life of
a whole world.
The stone worn by the thern who confronted us was of about the same
size as that which I had seen before; an inch in diameter I should say.
It scintillated nine different and distinct rays; the seven primary
colours of our earthly prism and the two rays which are unknown upon
Earth, but whose wondrous beauty is indescribable.
As the thern saw us his eyes narrowed to two nasty slits.
“Stop!” he cried. “What means this, Thuvia?”
For answer the girl raised her revolver and fired point-blank at him.
Without a sound he sank to the earth, dead.
“Beast!” she hissed. “After all these years I am at last revenged.”
Then as she turned toward me, evidently with a word of explanation on
her lips, her eyes suddenly widened as they rested upon me, and with a
little exclamation she started toward me.
“O Prince,” she cried, “Fate is indeed kind to us. The way is still
difficult, but through this vile thing upon the floor we may yet win to
the outer world. Notest thou not the remarkable resemblance between
this Holy Thern and thyself?”
The man was indeed of my precise stature, nor were his eyes and
features unlike mine; but his hair was a mass of flowing yellow locks,
like those of the two I had killed, while mine is black and close
cropped.
“What of the resemblance?” I asked the girl Thuvia. “Do you wish me
with my black, short hair to pose as a yellow-haired priest of this
infernal cult?”
She smiled, and for answer approached the body of the man she had
slain, and kneeling beside it removed the circlet of gold from the
forehead, and then to my utter amazement lifted the entire scalp bodily
from the corpse’s head.
Rising, she advanced to my side and placing the yellow wig over my
black hair, crowned me with the golden circlet set with the magnificent
gem.
“Now don his harness, Prince,” she said, “and you may pass where you
will in the realms of the therns, for Sator Throg was a Holy Thern of
the Tenth Cycle, and mighty among his kind.”
As I stooped to the dead man to do her bidding I noted that not a hair
grew upon his head, which was quite as bald as an egg.
“They are all thus from birth,” explained Thuvia noting my surprise.
“The race from which they sprang were crowned with a luxuriant growth
of golden hair, but for many ages the present race has been entirely
bald. The wig, however, has come to be a part of their apparel, and so
important a part do they consider it that it is cause for the deepest
disgrace were a thern to appear in public without it.”
In another moment I stood garbed in the habiliments of a Holy Thern.
At Thuvia’s suggestion two of the released prisoners bore the body of
the dead thern upon their shoulders with us as we continued our journey
toward the storeroom, which we reached without further mishap.
Here the keys which Thuvia bore from the dead thern of the prison vault
were the means of giving us immediate entrance to the chamber, and very
quickly we were thoroughly outfitted with arms and ammunition.
By this time I was so thoroughly fagged out that I could go no further,
so I threw myself upon the floor, bidding Tars Tarkas to do likewise,
and cautioning two of the released prisoners to keep careful watch.
In an instant I was asleep.
CHAPTER V
CORRIDORS OF PERIL
How long I slept upon the floor of the storeroom I do not know, but it
must have been many hours.
I was awakened with a start by cries of alarm, and scarce were my eyes
opened, nor had I yet sufficiently collected my wits to quite realize
where I was, when a fusillade of shots rang out, reverberating through
the subterranean corridors in a series of deafening echoes.
In an instant I was upon my feet. A dozen lesser therns confronted us
from a large doorway at the opposite end of the storeroom from which we
had entered. About me lay the bodies of my companions, with the
exception of Thuvia and Tars Tarkas, who, like myself, had been asleep
upon the floor and thus escaped the first raking fire.
As I gained my feet the therns lowered their wicked rifles, their faces
distorted in mingled chagrin, consternation, and alarm.
Instantly I rose to the occasion.
“What means this?” I cried in tones of fierce anger. “Is Sator Throg to
be murdered by his own vassals?”
“Have mercy, O Master of the Tenth Cycle!” cried one of the fellows,
while the others edged toward the doorway as though to attempt a
surreptitious escape from the presence of the mighty one.
“Ask them their mission here,” whispered Thuvia at my elbow.
“What do you here, fellows?” I cried.
“Two from the outer world are at large within the dominions of the
therns. We sought them at the command of the Father of Therns. One was
white with black hair, the other a huge green warrior,” and here the
fellow cast a suspicious glance toward Tars Tarkas.
“Here, then, is one of them,” spoke Thuvia, indicating the Thark, “and
if you will look upon this dead man by the door perhaps you will
recognize the other. It was left for Sator Throg and his poor slaves to
accomplish what the lesser therns of the guard were unable to do—we
have killed one and captured the other; for this had Sator Throg given
us our liberty. And now in your stupidity have you come and killed all
but myself, and like to have killed the mighty Sator Throg himself.”
The men looked very sheepish and very scared.
“Had they not better throw these bodies to the plant men and then
return to their quarters, O Mighty One?” asked Thuvia of me.
“Yes; do as Thuvia bids you,” I said.
As the men picked up the bodies I noticed that the one who stooped to
gather up the late Sator Throg started as his closer scrutiny fell upon
the upturned face, and then the fellow stole a furtive, sneaking glance
in my direction from the corner of his eye.
That he suspicioned something of the truth I could have sworn; but that
it was only a suspicion which he did not dare voice was evidenced by
his silence.
Again, as he bore the body from the room, he shot a quick but searching
glance toward me, and then his eyes fell once more upon the bald and
shiny dome of the dead man in his arms. The last fleeting glimpse that
I obtained of his profile as he passed from my sight without the
chamber revealed a cunning smile of triumph upon his lips.
Only Tars Tarkas, Thuvia, and I were left. The fatal marksmanship of
the therns had snatched from our companions whatever slender chance
they had of gaining the perilous freedom of the world without.
So soon as the last of the gruesome procession had disappeared the girl
urged us to take up our flight once more.
She, too, had noted the questioning attitude of the thern who had borne
Sator Throg away.
“It bodes no good for us, O Prince,” she said. “For even though this
fellow dared not chance accusing you in error, there be those above
with power sufficient to demand a closer scrutiny, and that, Prince,
would indeed prove fatal.”
I shrugged my shoulders. It seemed that in any event the outcome of our
plight must end in death. I was refreshed from my sleep, but still weak
from loss of blood. My wounds were painful. No medicinal aid seemed
possible. How I longed for the almost miraculous healing power of the
strange salves and lotions of the green Martian women. In an hour they
would have had me as new.
I was discouraged. Never had a feeling of such utter hopelessness come
over me in the face of danger. Then the long flowing, yellow locks of
the Holy Thern, caught by some vagrant draught, blew about my face.
Might they not still open the way of freedom? If we acted in time,
might we not even yet escape before the general alarm was sounded? We
could at least try.
“What will the fellow do first, Thuvia?” I asked. “How long will it be
before they may return for us?”
“He will go directly to the Father of Therns, old Matai Shang. He may
have to wait for an audience, but since he is very high among the
lesser therns, in fact as a thorian among them, it will not be long
that Matai Shang will keep him waiting.
“Then if the Father of Therns puts credence in his story, another hour
will see the galleries and chambers, the courts and gardens, filled
with searchers.”
“What we do then must be done within an hour. What is the best way,
Thuvia, the shortest way out of this celestial Hades?”
“Straight to the top of the cliffs, Prince,” she replied, “and then
through the gardens to the inner courts. From there our way will lie
within the temples of the therns and across them to the outer court.
Then the ramparts—O Prince, it is hopeless. Ten thousand warriors could
not hew a way to liberty from out this awful place.
“Since the beginning of time, little by little, stone by stone, have
the therns been ever adding to the defences of their stronghold. A
continuous line of impregnable fortifications circles the outer slopes
of the Mountains of Otz.
“Within the temples that lie behind the ramparts a million fighting-men
are ever ready. The courts and gardens are filled with slaves, with
women and with children.
“None could go a stone’s throw without detection.”
“If there is no other way, Thuvia, why dwell upon the difficulties of
this. We must face them.”
“Can we not better make the attempt after dark?” asked Tars Tarkas.
“There would seem to be no chance by day.”
“There would be a little better chance by night, but even then the
ramparts are well guarded; possibly better than by day. There are fewer
abroad in the courts and gardens, though,” said Thuvia.
“What is the hour?” I asked.
“It was midnight when you released me from my chains,” said Thuvia.
“Two hours later we reached the storeroom. There you slept for fourteen
hours. It must now be nearly sundown again. Come, we will go to some
nearby window in the cliff and make sure.”
So saying, she led the way through winding corridors until at a sudden
turn we came upon an opening which overlooked the Valley Dor.
At our right the sun was setting, a huge red orb, below the western
range of Otz. A little below us stood the Holy Thern on watch upon his
balcony. His scarlet robe of office was pulled tightly about him in
anticipation of the cold that comes so suddenly with darkness as the
sun sets. So rare is the atmosphere of Mars that it absorbs very little
heat from the sun. During the daylight hours it is always extremely
hot; at night it is intensely cold. Nor does the thin atmosphere
refract the sun’s rays or diffuse its light as upon Earth. There is no
twilight on Mars. When the great orb of day disappears beneath the
horizon the effect is precisely as that of the extinguishing of a
single lamp within a chamber. From brilliant light you are plunged
without warning into utter darkness. Then the moons come; the
mysterious, magic moons of Mars, hurtling like monster meteors low
across the face of the planet.
The declining sun lighted brilliantly the eastern banks of Korus, the
crimson sward, the gorgeous forest. Beneath the trees we saw feeding
many herds of plant men. The adults stood aloft upon their toes and
their mighty tails, their talons pruning every available leaf and twig.
It was then that I understood the careful trimming of the trees which
had led me to form the mistaken idea when first I opened my eyes upon
the grove that it was the playground of a civilized people.
As we watched, our eyes wandered to the rolling Iss, which issued from
the base of the cliffs beneath us. Presently there emerged from the
mountain a canoe laden with lost souls from the outer world. There were
a dozen of them. All were of the highly civilized and cultured race of
red men who are dominant on Mars.
The eyes of the herald upon the balcony beneath us fell upon the doomed
party as soon as did ours. He raised his head and leaning far out over
the low rail that rimmed his dizzy perch, voiced the shrill, weird wail
that called the demons of this hellish place to the attack.
For an instant the brutes stood with stiffly erected ears, then they
poured from the grove toward the river’s bank, covering the distance
with great, ungainly leaps.
The party had landed and was standing on the sward as the awful horde
came in sight. There was a brief and futile effort of defence. Then
silence as the huge, repulsive shapes covered the bodies of their
victims and scores of sucking mouths fastened themselves to the flesh
of their prey.
I turned away in disgust.
“Their part is soon over,” said Thuvia. “The great white apes get the
flesh when the plant men have drained the arteries. Look, they are
coming now.”
As I turned my eyes in the direction the girl indicated, I saw a dozen
of the great white monsters running across the valley toward the river
bank. Then the sun went down and darkness that could almost be felt
engulfed us.
Thuvia lost no time in leading us toward the corridor which winds back
and forth up through the cliffs toward the surface thousands of feet
above the level on which we had been.
Twice great banths, wandering loose through the galleries, blocked our
progress, but in each instance Thuvia spoke a low word of command and
the snarling beasts slunk sullenly away.
“If you can dissolve all our obstacles as easily as you master these
fierce brutes I can see no difficulties in our way,” I said to the
girl, smiling. “How do you do it?”
She laughed, and then shuddered.
“I do not quite know,” she said. “When first I came here I angered
Sator Throg, because I repulsed him. He ordered me to be thrown into
one of the great pits in the inner gardens. It was filled with banths.
In my own country I had been accustomed to command. Something in my
voice, I do not know what, cowed the beasts as they sprang to attack
me.
“Instead of tearing me to pieces, as Sator Throg had desired, they
fawned at my feet. So greatly were Sator Throg and his friends amused
by the sight that they kept me to train and handle the terrible
creatures. I know them all by name. There are many of them wandering
through these lower regions. They are the scavengers. Many prisoners
die here in their chains. The banths solve the problem of sanitation,
at least in this respect.
“In the gardens and temples above they are kept in pits. The therns
fear them. It is because of the banths that they seldom venture below
ground except as their duties call them.”
An idea occurred to me, suggested by what Thuvia had just said.
“Why not take a number of banths and set them loose before us above
ground?” I asked.
Thuvia laughed.
“It would distract attention from us, I am sure,” she said.
She commenced calling in a low singsong voice that was half purr. She
continued this as we wound our tedious way through the maze of
subterranean passages and chambers.
Presently soft, padded feet sounded close behind us, and as I turned I
saw a pair of great, green eyes shining in the dark shadows at our
rear. From a diverging tunnel a sinuous, tawny form crept stealthily
toward us.
Low growls and angry snarls assailed our ears on every side as we
hastened on and one by one the ferocious creatures answered the call of
their mistress.
She spoke a word to each as it joined us. Like well-schooled terriers,
they paced the corridors with us, but I could not help but note the
lathering jowls, nor the hungry expressions with which they eyed Tars
Tarkas and myself.
Soon we were entirely surrounded by some fifty of the brutes. Two
walked close on either side of Thuvia, as guards might walk. The sleek
sides of others now and then touched my own naked limbs. It was a
strange experience; the almost noiseless passage of naked human feet
and padded paws; the golden walls splashed with precious stones; the
dim light cast by the tiny radium bulbs set at considerable distances
along the roof; the huge, maned beasts of prey crowding with low growls
about us; the mighty green warrior towering high above us all; myself
crowned with the priceless diadem of a Holy Thern; and leading the
procession the beautiful girl, Thuvia.
I shall not soon forget it.
Presently we approached a great chamber more brightly lighted than the
corridors. Thuvia halted us. Quietly she stole toward the entrance and
glanced within. Then she motioned us to follow her.
The room was filled with specimens of the strange beings that inhabit
this underworld; a heterogeneous collection of hybrids—the offspring of
the prisoners from the outside world; red and green Martians and the
white race of therns.
Constant confinement below ground had wrought odd freaks upon their
skins. They more resemble corpses than living beings. Many are
deformed, others maimed, while the majority, Thuvia explained, are
sightless.
As they lay sprawled about the floor, sometimes overlapping one
another, again in heaps of several bodies, they suggested instantly to
me the grotesque illustrations that I had seen in copies of Dante’s
_Inferno_, and what more fitting comparison? Was this not indeed a
veritable hell, peopled by lost souls, dead and damned beyond all hope?
Picking our way carefully we threaded a winding path across the
chamber, the great banths sniffing hungrily at the tempting prey spread
before them in such tantalizing and defenceless profusion.
Several times we passed the entrances to other chambers similarly
peopled, and twice again we were compelled to cross directly through
them. In others were chained prisoners and beasts.
“Why is it that we see no therns?” I asked of Thuvia.
“They seldom traverse the underworld at night, for then it is that the
great banths prowl the dim corridors seeking their prey. The therns
fear the awful denizens of this cruel and hopeless world that they have
fostered and allowed to grow beneath their feet. The prisoners even
sometimes turn upon them and rend them. The thern can never tell from
what dark shadow an assassin may spring upon his back.
“By day it is different. Then the corridors and chambers are filled
with guards passing to and fro; slaves from the temples above come by
hundreds to the granaries and storerooms. All is life then. You did not
see it because I led you not in the beaten tracks, but through
roundabout passages seldom used. Yet it is possible that we may meet a
thern even yet. They do occasionally find it necessary to come here
after the sun has set. Because of this I have moved with such great
caution.”
But we reached the upper galleries without detection and presently
Thuvia halted us at the foot of a short, steep ascent.
“Above us,” she said, “is a doorway which opens on to the inner
gardens. I have brought you thus far. From here on for four miles to
the outer ramparts our way will be beset by countless dangers. Guards
patrol the courts, the temples, the gardens. Every inch of the ramparts
themselves is beneath the eye of a sentry.”
I could not understand the necessity for such an enormous force of
armed men about a spot so surrounded by mystery and superstition that
not a soul upon Barsoom would have dared to approach it even had they
known its exact location. I questioned Thuvia, asking her what enemies
the therns could fear in their impregnable fortress.
We had reached the doorway now and Thuvia was opening it.
“They fear the black pirates of Barsoom, O Prince,” she said, “from
whom may our first ancestors preserve us.”
The door swung open; the smell of growing things greeted my nostrils;
the cool night air blew against my cheek. The great banths sniffed the
unfamiliar odours, and then with a rush they broke past us with low
growls, swarming across the gardens beneath the lurid light of the
nearer moon.
Suddenly a great cry arose from the roofs of the temples; a cry of
alarm and warning that, taken up from point to point, ran off to the
east and to the west, from temple, court, and rampart, until it sounded
as a dim echo in the distance.
The great Thark’s long-sword leaped from its scabbard; Thuvia shrank
shuddering to my side.
CHAPTER VI
THE BLACK PIRATES OF BARSOOM
“What is it?” I asked of the girl.
For answer she pointed to the sky.
I looked, and there, above us, I saw shadowy bodies flitting hither and
thither high over temple, court, and garden.
Almost immediately flashes of light broke from these strange objects.
There was a roar of musketry, and then answering flashes and roars from
temple and rampart.
“The black pirates of Barsoom, O Prince,” said Thuvia.
In great circles the air craft of the marauders swept lower and lower
toward the defending forces of the therns.
Volley after volley they vomited upon the temple guards; volley on
volley crashed through the thin air toward the fleeting and illusive
fliers.
As the pirates swooped closer toward the ground, thern soldiery poured
from the temples into the gardens and courts. The sight of them in the
open brought a score of fliers darting toward us from all directions.
The therns fired upon them through shields affixed to their rifles, but
on, steadily on, came the grim, black craft. They were small fliers for
the most part, built for two to three men. A few larger ones there
were, but these kept high aloft dropping bombs upon the temples from
their keel batteries.
At length, with a concerted rush, evidently in response to a signal of
command, the pirates in our immediate vicinity dashed recklessly to the
ground in the very midst of the thern soldiery.
Scarcely waiting for their craft to touch, the creatures manning them
leaped among the therns with the fury of demons. Such fighting! Never
had I witnessed its like before. I had thought the green Martians the
most ferocious warriors in the universe, but the awful abandon with
which the black pirates threw themselves upon their foes transcended
everything I ever before had seen.
Beneath the brilliant light of Mars’ two glorious moons the whole scene
presented itself in vivid distinctness. The golden-haired,
white-skinned therns battling with desperate courage in hand-to-hand
conflict with their ebony-skinned foemen.
Here a little knot of struggling warriors trampled a bed of gorgeous
pimalia; there the curved sword of a black man found the heart of a
thern and left its dead foeman at the foot of a wondrous statue carved
from a living ruby; yonder a dozen therns pressed a single pirate back
upon a bench of emerald, upon whose iridescent surface a strangely
beautiful Barsoomian design was traced out in inlaid diamonds.
A little to one side stood Thuvia, the Thark, and I. The tide of battle
had not reached us, but the fighters from time to time swung close
enough that we might distinctly note them.
The black pirates interested me immensely. I had heard vague rumours,
little more than legends they were, during my former life on Mars; but
never had I seen them, nor talked with one who had.
They were popularly supposed to inhabit the lesser moon, from which
they descended upon Barsoom at long intervals. Where they visited they
wrought the most horrible atrocities, and when they left carried away
with them firearms and ammunition, and young girls as prisoners. These
latter, the rumour had it, they sacrificed to some terrible god in an
orgy which ended in the eating of their victims.
I had an excellent opportunity to examine them, as the strife
occasionally brought now one and now another close to where I stood.
They were large men, possibly six feet and over in height. Their
features were clear cut and handsome in the extreme; their eyes were
well set and large, though a slight narrowness lent them a crafty
appearance; the iris, as well as I could determine by moonlight, was of
extreme blackness, while the eyeball itself was quite white and clear.
The physical structure of their bodies seemed identical with those of
the therns, the red men, and my own. Only in the colour of their skin
did they differ materially from us; that is of the appearance of
polished ebony, and odd as it may seem for a Southerner to say it, adds
to rather than detracts from their marvellous beauty.
But if their bodies are divine, their hearts, apparently, are quite the
reverse. Never did I witness such a malign lust for blood as these
demons of the outer air evinced in their mad battle with the therns.
All about us in the garden lay their sinister craft, which the therns
for some reason, then unaccountable to me, made no effort to injure.
Now and again a black warrior would rush from a nearby temple bearing a
young woman in his arms. Straight for his flier he would leap while
those of his comrades who fought near by would rush to cover his
escape.
The therns on their side would hasten to rescue the girl, and in an
instant the two would be swallowed in the vortex of a maelstrom of
yelling devils, hacking and hewing at one another, like fiends
incarnate.
But always, it seemed, were the black pirates of Barsoom victorious,
and the girl, brought miraculously unharmed through the conflict, borne
away into the outer darkness upon the deck of a swift flier.
Fighting similar to that which surrounded us could be heard in both
directions as far as sound carried, and Thuvia told me that the attacks
of the black pirates were usually made simultaneously along the entire
ribbon-like domain of the therns, which circles the Valley Dor on the
outer slopes of the Mountains of Otz.
As the fighting receded from our position for a moment, Thuvia turned
toward me with a question.
“Do you understand now, O Prince,” she said, “why a million warriors
guard the domains of the Holy Therns by day and by night?”
“The scene you are witnessing now is but a repetition of what I have
seen enacted a score of times during the fifteen years I have been a
prisoner here. From time immemorial the black pirates of Barsoom have
preyed upon the Holy Therns.
“Yet they never carry their expeditions to a point, as one might
readily believe it was in their power to do, where the extermination of
the race of therns is threatened. It is as though they but utilized the
race as playthings, with which they satisfy their ferocious lust for
fighting; and from whom they collect toll in arms and ammunition and in
prisoners.”
“Why don’t they jump in and destroy these fliers?” I asked. “That would
soon put a stop to the attacks, or at least the blacks would scarce be
so bold. Why, see how perfectly unguarded they leave their craft, as
though they were lying safe in their own hangars at home.”
“The therns do not dare. They tried it once, ages ago, but the next
night and for a whole moon thereafter a thousand great black
battleships circled the Mountains of Otz, pouring tons of projectiles
upon the temples, the gardens, and the courts, until every thern who
was not killed was driven for safety into the subterranean galleries.
“The therns know that they live at all only by the sufferance of the
black men. They were near to extermination that once and they will not
venture risking it again.”
As she ceased talking a new element was instilled into the conflict. It
came from a source equally unlooked for by either thern or pirate. The
great banths which we had liberated in the garden had evidently been
awed at first by the sound of the battle, the yelling of the warriors
and the loud report of rifle and bomb.
But now they must have become angered by the continuous noise and
excited by the smell of new blood, for all of a sudden a great form
shot from a clump of low shrubbery into the midst of a struggling mass
of humanity. A horrid scream of bestial rage broke from the banth as he
felt warm flesh beneath his powerful talons.
As though his cry was but a signal to the others, the entire great pack
hurled themselves among the fighters. Panic reigned in an instant.
Thern and black man turned alike against the common enemy, for the
banths showed no partiality toward either.
The awful beasts bore down a hundred men by the mere weight of their
great bodies as they hurled themselves into the thick of the fight.
Leaping and clawing, they mowed down the warriors with their powerful
paws, turning for an instant to rend their victims with frightful
fangs.
The scene was fascinating in its terribleness, but suddenly it came to
me that we were wasting valuable time watching this conflict, which in
itself might prove a means of our escape.
The therns were so engaged with their terrible assailants that now, if
ever, escape should be comparatively easy. I turned to search for an
opening through the contending hordes. If we could but reach the
ramparts we might find that the pirates somewhere had thinned the
guarding forces and left a way open to us to the world without.
As my eyes wandered about the garden, the sight of the hundreds of air
craft lying unguarded around us suggested the simplest avenue to
freedom. Why it had not occurred to me before! I was thoroughly
familiar with the mechanism of every known make of flier on Barsoom.
For nine years I had sailed and fought with the navy of Helium. I had
raced through space on the tiny one-man air scout and I had commanded
the greatest battleship that ever had floated in the thin air of dying
Mars.
To think, with me, is to act. Grasping Thuvia by the arm, I whispered
to Tars Tarkas to follow me. Quickly we glided toward a small flier
which lay furthest from the battling warriors. Another instant found us
huddled on the tiny deck. My hand was on the starting lever. I pressed
my thumb upon the button which controls the ray of repulsion, that
splendid discovery of the Martians which permits them to navigate the
thin atmosphere of their planet in huge ships that dwarf the
dreadnoughts of our earthly navies into pitiful insignificance.
The craft swayed slightly but she did not move. Then a new cry of
warning broke upon our ears. Turning, I saw a dozen black pirates
dashing toward us from the melee. We had been discovered. With shrieks
of rage the demons sprang for us. With frenzied insistence I continued
to press the little button which should have sent us racing out into
space, but still the vessel refused to budge. Then it came to me—the
reason that she would not rise.
We had stumbled upon a two-man flier. Its ray tanks were charged only
with sufficient repulsive energy to lift two ordinary men. The Thark’s
great weight was anchoring us to our doom.
The blacks were nearly upon us. There was not an instant to be lost in
hesitation or doubt.
I pressed the button far in and locked it. Then I set the lever at high
speed and as the blacks came yelling upon us I slipped from the craft’s
deck and with drawn long-sword met the attack.
At the same moment a girl’s shriek rang out behind me and an instant
later, as the blacks fell upon me. I heard far above my head, and
faintly, in Thuvia’s voice: “My Prince, O my Prince; I would rather
remain and die with—” But the rest was lost in the noise of my
assailants.
I knew though that my ruse had worked and that temporarily at least
Thuvia and Tars Tarkas were safe, and the means of escape was theirs.
For a moment it seemed that I could not withstand the weight of numbers
that confronted me, but again, as on so many other occasions when I had
been called upon to face fearful odds upon this planet of warriors and
fierce beasts, I found that my earthly strength so far transcended that
of my opponents that the odds were not so greatly against me as they
appeared.
My seething blade wove a net of death about me. For an instant the
blacks pressed close to reach me with their shorter swords, but
presently they gave back, and the esteem in which they suddenly had
learned to hold my sword arm was writ large upon each countenance.
I knew though that it was but a question of minutes before their
greater numbers would wear me down, or get around my guard. I must go
down eventually to certain death before them. I shuddered at the
thought of it, dying thus in this terrible place where no word of my
end ever could reach my Dejah Thoris. Dying at the hands of nameless
black men in the gardens of the cruel therns.
Then my old-time spirit reasserted itself. The fighting blood of my
Virginian sires coursed hot through my veins. The fierce blood lust and
the joy of battle surged over me. The fighting smile that has brought
consternation to a thousand foemen touched my lips. I put the thought
of death out of my mind, and fell upon my antagonists with fury that
those who escaped will remember to their dying day.
That others would press to the support of those who faced me I knew, so
even as I fought I kept my wits at work, searching for an avenue of
escape.
It came from an unexpected quarter out of the black night behind me. I
had just disarmed a huge fellow who had given me a desperate struggle,
and for a moment the blacks stood back for a breathing spell.
They eyed me with malignant fury, yet withal there was a touch of
respect in their demeanour.
“Thern,” said one, “you fight like a Dator. But for your detestable
yellow hair and your white skin you would be an honour to the First
Born of Barsoom.”
“I am no thern,” I said, and was about to explain that I was from
another world, thinking that by patching a truce with these fellows and
fighting with them against the therns I might enlist their aid in
regaining my liberty. But just at that moment a heavy object smote me a
resounding whack between my shoulders that nearly felled me to the
ground.
As I turned to meet this new enemy an object passed over my shoulder,
striking one of my assailants squarely in the face and knocking him
senseless to the sward. At the same instant I saw that the thing that
had struck us was the trailing anchor of a rather fair-sized air
vessel; possibly a ten man cruiser.
The ship was floating slowly above us, not more than fifty feet over
our heads. Instantly the one chance for escape that it offered
presented itself to me. The vessel was slowly rising and now the anchor
was beyond the blacks who faced me and several feet above their heads.
With a bound that left them gaping in wide-eyed astonishment I sprang
completely over them. A second leap carried me just high enough to
grasp the now rapidly receding anchor.
But I was successful, and there I hung by one hand, dragging through
the branches of the higher vegetation of the gardens, while my late
foemen shrieked and howled beneath me.
Presently the vessel veered toward the west and then swung gracefully
to the south. In another instant I was carried beyond the crest of the
Golden Cliffs, out over the Valley Dor, where, six thousand feet below
me, the Lost Sea of Korus lay shimmering in the moonlight.
Carefully I climbed to a sitting posture across the anchor’s arms. I
wondered if by chance the vessel might be deserted. I hoped so. Or
possibly it might belong to a friendly people, and have wandered by
accident almost within the clutches of the pirates and the therns. The
fact that it was retreating from the scene of battle lent colour to
this hypothesis.
But I decided to know positively, and at once, so, with the greatest
caution, I commenced to climb slowly up the anchor chain toward the
deck above me.
One hand had just reached for the vessel’s rail and found it when a
fierce black face was thrust over the side and eyes filled with
triumphant hate looked into mine.
CHAPTER VII
A FAIR GODDESS
For an instant the black pirate and I remained motionless, glaring into
each other’s eyes. Then a grim smile curled the handsome lips above me,
as an ebony hand came slowly in sight from above the edge of the deck
and the cold, hollow eye of a revolver sought the centre of my
forehead.
[Illustration] The cold, hollow eye of a revolver sought the centre of
my forehead.
Simultaneously my free hand shot out for the black throat, just within
reach, and the ebony finger tightened on the trigger. The pirate’s
hissing, “Die, cursed thern,” was half choked in his windpipe by my
clutching fingers. The hammer fell with a futile click upon an empty
chamber.
Before he could fire again I had pulled him so far over the edge of the
deck that he was forced to drop his firearm and clutch the rail with
both hands.
My grasp upon his throat effectually prevented any outcry, and so we
struggled in grim silence; he to tear away from my hold, I to drag him
over to his death.
His face was taking on a livid hue, his eyes were bulging from their
sockets. It was evident to him that he soon must die unless he tore
loose from the steel fingers that were choking the life from him. With
a final effort he threw himself further back upon the deck, at the same
instant releasing his hold upon the rail to tear frantically with both
hands at my fingers in an effort to drag them from his throat.
That little second was all that I awaited. With one mighty downward
surge I swept him clear of the deck. His falling body came near to
tearing me from the frail hold that my single free hand had upon the
anchor chain and plunging me with him to the waters of the sea below.
I did not relinquish my grasp upon him, however, for I knew that a
single shriek from those lips as he hurtled to his death in the silent
waters of the sea would bring his comrades from above to avenge him.
Instead I held grimly to him, choking, ever choking, while his frantic
struggles dragged me lower and lower toward the end of the chain.
Gradually his contortions became spasmodic, lessening by degrees until
they ceased entirely. Then I released my hold upon him and in an
instant he was swallowed by the black shadows far below.
Again I climbed to the ship’s rail. This time I succeeded in raising my
eyes to the level of the deck, where I could take a careful survey of
the conditions immediately confronting me.
The nearer moon had passed below the horizon, but the clear effulgence
of the further satellite bathed the deck of the cruiser, bringing into
sharp relief the bodies of six or eight black men sprawled about in
sleep.
Huddled close to the base of a rapid fire gun was a young white girl,
securely bound. Her eyes were widespread in an expression of horrified
anticipation and fixed directly upon me as I came in sight above the
edge of the deck.
Unutterable relief instantly filled them as if they fell upon the
mystic jewel which sparkled in the centre of my stolen headpiece. She
did not speak. Instead her eyes warned me to beware the sleeping
figures that surrounded her.
Noiselessly I gained the deck. The girl nodded to me to approach her.
As I bent low she whispered to me to release her.
“I can aid you,” she said, “and you will need all the aid available
when they awaken.”
“Some of them will awake in Korus,” I replied smiling.
She caught the meaning of my words, and the cruelty of her answering
smile horrified me. One is not astonished by cruelty in a hideous face,
but when it touches the features of a goddess whose fine-chiselled
lineaments might more fittingly portray love and beauty, the contrast
is appalling.
Quickly I released her.
“Give me a revolver,” she whispered. “I can use that upon those your
sword does not silence in time.”
I did as she bid. Then I turned toward the distasteful work that lay
before me. This was no time for fine compunctions, nor for a chivalry
that these cruel demons would neither appreciate nor reciprocate.
Stealthily I approached the nearest sleeper. When he awoke he was well
on his journey to the bosom of Korus. His piercing shriek as
consciousness returned to him came faintly up to us from the black
depths beneath.
The second awoke as I touched him, and, though I succeeded in hurling
him from the cruiser’s deck, his wild cry of alarm brought the
remaining pirates to their feet. There were five of them.
As they arose the girl’s revolver spoke in sharp staccato and one sank
back to the deck again to rise no more.
The others rushed madly upon me with drawn swords. The girl evidently
dared not fire for fear of wounding me, but I saw her sneak stealthily
and cat-like toward the flank of the attackers. Then they were on me.
For a few minutes I experienced some of the hottest fighting I had ever
passed through. The quarters were too small for foot work. It was stand
your ground and give and take. At first I took considerably more than I
gave, but presently I got beneath one fellow’s guard and had the
satisfaction of seeing him collapse upon the deck.
The others redoubled their efforts. The crashing of their blades upon
mine raised a terrific din that might have been heard for miles through
the silent night. Sparks flew as steel smote steel, and then there was
the dull and sickening sound of a shoulder bone parting beneath the
keen edge of my Martian sword.
Three now faced me, but the girl was working her way to a point that
would soon permit her to reduce the number by one at least. Then things
happened with such amazing rapidity that I can scarce comprehend even
now all that took place in that brief instant.
The three rushed me with the evident purpose of forcing me back the few
steps that would carry my body over the rail into the void below. At
the same instant the girl fired and my sword arm made two moves. One
man dropped with a bullet in his brain; a sword flew clattering across
the deck and dropped over the edge beyond as I disarmed one of my
opponents and the third went down with my blade buried to the hilt in
his breast and three feet of it protruding from his back, and falling
wrenched the sword from my grasp.
Disarmed myself, I now faced my remaining foeman, whose own sword lay
somewhere thousands of feet below us, lost in the Lost Sea.
The new conditions seemed to please my adversary, for a smile of
satisfaction bared his gleaming teeth as he rushed at me bare-handed.
The great muscles which rolled beneath his glossy black hide evidently
assured him that here was easy prey, not worth the trouble of drawing
the dagger from his harness.
I let him come almost upon me. Then I ducked beneath his outstretched
arms, at the same time sidestepping to the right. Pivoting on my left
toe, I swung a terrific right to his jaw, and, like a felled ox, he
dropped in his tracks.
A low, silvery laugh rang out behind me.
“You are no thern,” said the sweet voice of my companion, “for all your
golden locks or the harness of Sator Throg. Never lived there upon all
Barsoom before one who could fight as you have fought this night. Who
are you?”
“I am John Carter, Prince of the House of Tardos Mors, Jeddak of
Helium,” I replied. “And whom,” I added, “has the honour of serving
been accorded me?”
She hesitated a moment before speaking. Then she asked:
“You are no thern. Are you an enemy of the therns?”
“I have been in the territory of the therns for a day and a half.
During that entire time my life has been in constant danger. I have
been harassed and persecuted. Armed men and fierce beasts have been set
upon me. I had no quarrel with the therns before, but can you wonder
that I feel no great love for them now? I have spoken.”
She looked at me intently for several minutes before she replied. It
was as though she were attempting to read my inmost soul, to judge my
character and my standards of chivalry in that long-drawn, searching
gaze.
Apparently the inventory satisfied her.
“I am Phaidor, daughter of Matai Shang, Holy Hekkador of the Holy
Therns, Father of Therns, Master of Life and Death upon Barsoom,
Brother of Issus, Prince of Life Eternal.”
At that moment I noticed that the black I had dropped with my fist was
commencing to show signs of returning consciousness. I sprang to his
side. Stripping his harness from him I securely bound his hands behind
his back, and after similarly fastening his feet tied him to a heavy
gun carriage.
“Why not the simpler way?” asked Phaidor.
“I do not understand. What ‘simpler way’?” I replied.
With a slight shrug of her lovely shoulders she made a gesture with her
hands personating the casting of something over the craft’s side.
“I am no murderer,” I said. “I kill in self-defence only.”
She looked at me narrowly. Then she puckered those divine brows of
hers, and shook her head. She could not comprehend.
Well, neither had my own Dejah Thoris been able to understand what to
her had seemed a foolish and dangerous policy toward enemies. Upon
Barsoom, quarter is neither asked nor given, and each dead man means so
much more of the waning resources of this dying planet to be divided
amongst those who survive.
But there seemed a subtle difference here between the manner in which
this girl contemplated the dispatching of an enemy and the
tender-hearted regret of my own princess for the stern necessity which
demanded it.
I think that Phaidor regretted the thrill that the spectacle would have
afforded her rather than the fact that my decision left another enemy
alive to threaten us.
The man had now regained full possession of his faculties, and was
regarding us intently from where he lay bound upon the deck. He was a
handsome fellow, clean limbed and powerful, with an intelligent face
and features of such exquisite chiselling that Adonis himself might
have envied him.
The vessel, unguided, had been moving slowly across the valley; but now
I thought it time to take the helm and direct her course. Only in a
very general way could I guess the location of the Valley Dor. That it
was far south of the equator was evident from the constellations, but I
was not sufficiently a Martian astronomer to come much closer than a
rough guess without the splendid charts and delicate instruments with
which, as an officer in the Heliumite Navy, I had formerly reckoned the
positions of the vessels on which I sailed.
That a northerly course would quickest lead me toward the more settled
portions of the planet immediately decided the direction that I should
steer. Beneath my hand the cruiser swung gracefully about. Then the
button which controlled the repulsive rays sent us soaring far out into
space. With speed lever pulled to the last notch, we raced toward the
north as we rose ever farther and farther above that terrible valley of
death.
As we passed at a dizzy height over the narrow domains of the therns
the flash of powder far below bore mute witness to the ferocity of the
battle that still raged along that cruel frontier. No sound of conflict
reached our ears, for in the rarefied atmosphere of our great altitude
no sound wave could penetrate; they were dissipated in thin air far
below us.
It became intensely cold. Breathing was difficult. The girl, Phaidor,
and the black pirate kept their eyes glued upon me. At length the girl
spoke.
“Unconsciousness comes quickly at this altitude,” she said quietly.
“Unless you are inviting death for us all you had best drop, and that
quickly.”
There was no fear in her voice. It was as one might say: “You had
better carry an umbrella. It is going to rain.”
I dropped the vessel quickly to a lower level. Nor was I a moment too
soon. The girl had swooned.
The black, too, was unconscious, while I, myself, retained my senses, I
think, only by sheer will. The one on whom all responsibility rests is
apt to endure the most.
We were swinging along low above the foothills of the Otz. It was
comparatively warm and there was plenty of air for our starved lungs,
so I was not surprised to see the black open his eyes, and a moment
later the girl also.
“It was a close call,” she said.
“It has taught me two things though,” I replied.
“What?”
“That even Phaidor, daughter of the Master of Life and Death, is
mortal,” I said smiling.
“There is immortality only in Issus,” she replied. “And Issus is for
the race of therns alone. Thus am I immortal.”
I caught a fleeting grin passing across the features of the black as he
heard her words. I did not then understand why he smiled. Later I was
to learn, and she, too, in a most horrible manner.
“If the other thing you have just learned,” she continued, “has led to
as erroneous deductions as the first you are little richer in knowledge
than you were before.”
“The other,” I replied, “is that our dusky friend here does not hail
from the nearer moon—he was like to have died at a few thousand feet
above Barsoom. Had we continued the five thousand miles that lie
between Thuria and the planet he would have been but the frozen memory
of a man.”
Phaidor looked at the black in evident astonishment.
“If you are not of Thuria, then where?” she asked.
He shrugged his shoulders and turned his eyes elsewhere, but did not
reply.
The girl stamped her little foot in a peremptory manner.
“The daughter of Matai Shang is not accustomed to having her queries
remain unanswered,” she said. “One of the lesser breed should feel
honoured that a member of the holy race that was born to inherit life
eternal should deign even to notice him.”
Again the black smiled that wicked, knowing smile.
“Xodar, Dator of the First Born of Barsoom, is accustomed to give
commands, not to receive them,” replied the black pirate. Then, turning
to me, “What are your intentions concerning me?”
“I intend taking you both back to Helium,” I said. “No harm will come
to you. You will find the red men of Helium a kindly and magnanimous
race, but if they listen to me there will be no more voluntary
pilgrimages down the river Iss, and the impossible belief that they
have cherished for ages will be shattered into a thousand pieces.”
“Are you of Helium?” he asked.
“I am a Prince of the House of Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium,” I
replied, “but I am not of Barsoom. I am of another world.”
Xodar looked at me intently for a few moments.
“I can well believe that you are not of Barsoom,” he said at length.
“None of this world could have bested eight of the First Born
single-handed. But how is it that you wear the golden hair and the
jewelled circlet of a Holy Thern?” He emphasized the word holy with a
touch of irony.
“I had forgotten them,” I said. “They are the spoils of conquest,” and
with a sweep of my hand I removed the disguise from my head.
When the black’s eyes fell on my close-cropped black hair they opened
in astonishment. Evidently he had looked for the bald pate of a thern.
“You are indeed of another world,” he said, a touch of awe in his
voice. “With the skin of a thern, the black hair of a First Born and
the muscles of a dozen Dators it was no disgrace even for Xodar to
acknowledge your supremacy. A thing he could never do were you a
Barsoomian,” he added.
“You are travelling several laps ahead of me, my friend,” I
interrupted. “I glean that your name is Xodar, but whom, pray, are the
First Born, and what a Dator, and why, if you were conquered by a
Barsoomian, could you not acknowledge it?”
“The First Born of Barsoom,” he explained, “are the race of black men
of which I am a Dator, or, as the lesser Barsoomians would say, Prince.
My race is the oldest on the planet. We trace our lineage, unbroken,
direct to the Tree of Life which flourished in the centre of the Valley
Dor twenty-three million years ago.
“For countless ages the fruit of this tree underwent the gradual
changes of evolution, passing by degrees from true plant life to a
combination of plant and animal. In the first stages the fruit of the
tree possessed only the power of independent muscular action, while the
stem remained attached to the parent plant; later a brain developed in
the fruit, so that hanging there by their long stems they thought and
moved as individuals.
“Then, with the development of perceptions came a comparison of them;
judgments were reached and compared, and thus reason and the power to
reason were born upon Barsoom.
“Ages passed. Many forms of life came and went upon the Tree of Life,
but still all were attached to the parent plant by stems of varying
lengths. At length the fruit tree consisted in tiny plant men, such as
we now see reproduced in such huge dimensions in the Valley Dor, but
still hanging to the limbs and branches of the tree by the stems which
grew from the tops of their heads.
“The buds from which the plant men blossomed resembled large nuts about
a foot in diameter, divided by double partition walls into four
sections. In one section grew the plant man, in another a
sixteen-legged worm, in the third the progenitor of the white ape and
in the fourth the primaeval black man of Barsoom.
“When the bud burst the plant man remained dangling at the end of his
stem, but the three other sections fell to the ground, where the
efforts of their imprisoned occupants to escape sent them hopping about
in all directions.
“Thus as time went on, all Barsoom was covered with these imprisoned
creatures. For countless ages they lived their long lives within their
hard shells, hopping and skipping about the broad planet; falling into
rivers, lakes, and seas, to be still further spread about the surface
of the new world.
“Countless billions died before the first black man broke through his
prison walls into the light of day. Prompted by curiosity, he broke
open other shells and the peopling of Barsoom commenced.
“The pure strain of the blood of this first black man has remained
untainted by admixture with other creatures in the race of which I am a
member; but from the sixteen-legged worm, the first ape and renegade
black man has sprung every other form of animal life upon Barsoom.
“The therns,” and he smiled maliciously as he spoke, “are but the
result of ages of evolution from the pure white ape of antiquity. They
are a lower order still. There is but one race of true and immortal
humans on Barsoom. It is the race of black men.
“The Tree of Life is dead, but before it died the plant men learned to
detach themselves from it and roam the face of Barsoom with the other
children of the First Parent.
“Now their bisexuality permits them to reproduce themselves after the
manner of true plants, but otherwise they have progressed but little in
all the ages of their existence. Their actions and movements are
largely matters of instinct and not guided to any great extent by
reason, since the brain of a plant man is but a trifle larger than the
end of your smallest finger. They live upon vegetation and the blood of
animals, and their brain is just large enough to direct their movements
in the direction of food, and to translate the food sensations which
are carried to it from their eyes and ears. They have no sense of
self-preservation and so are entirely without fear in the face of
danger. That is why they are such terrible antagonists in combat.”
I wondered why the black man took such pains to discourse thus at
length to enemies upon the genesis of life Barsoomian. It seemed a
strangely inopportune moment for a proud member of a proud race to
unbend in casual conversation with a captor. Especially in view of the
fact that the black still lay securely bound upon the deck.
It was the faintest straying of his eye beyond me for the barest
fraction of a second that explained his motive for thus dragging out my
interest in his truly absorbing story.
He lay a little forward of where I stood at the levers, and thus he
faced the stern of the vessel as he addressed me. It was at the end of
his description of the plant men that I caught his eye fixed
momentarily upon something behind me.
Nor could I be mistaken in the swift gleam of triumph that brightened
those dark orbs for an instant.
Some time before I had reduced our speed, for we had left the Valley
Dor many miles astern, and I felt comparatively safe.
I turned an apprehensive glance behind me, and the sight that I saw
froze the new-born hope of freedom that had been springing up within
me.
A great battleship, forging silent and unlighted through the dark
night, loomed close astern.
CHAPTER VIII
THE DEPTHS OF OMEAN
Now I realized why the black pirate had kept me engrossed with his
strange tale. For miles he had sensed the approach of succour, and but
for that single tell-tale glance the battleship would have been
directly above us in another moment, and the boarding party which was
doubtless even now swinging in their harness from the ship’s keel,
would have swarmed our deck, placing my rising hope of escape in sudden
and total eclipse.
I was too old a hand in aerial warfare to be at a loss now for the
right manoeuvre. Simultaneously I reversed the engines and dropped the
little vessel a sheer hundred feet.
Above my head I could see the dangling forms of the boarding party as
the battleship raced over us. Then I rose at a sharp angle, throwing my
speed lever to its last notch.
Like a bolt from a crossbow my splendid craft shot its steel prow
straight at the whirring propellers of the giant above us. If I could
but touch them the huge bulk would be disabled for hours and escape
once more possible.
At the same instant the sun shot above the horizon, disclosing a
hundred grim, black faces peering over the stern of the battleship upon
us.
At sight of us a shout of rage went up from a hundred throats. Orders
were shouted, but it was too late to save the giant propellers, and
with a crash we rammed them.
Instantly with the shock of impact I reversed my engine, but my prow
was wedged in the hole it had made in the battleship’s stern. Only a
second I hung there before tearing away, but that second was amply long
to swarm my deck with black devils.
There was no fight. In the first place there was no room to fight. We
were simply submerged by numbers. Then as swords menaced me a command
from Xodar stayed the hands of his fellows.
“Secure them,” he said, “but do not injure them.”
Several of the pirates already had released Xodar. He now personally
attended to my disarming and saw that I was properly bound. At least he
thought that the binding was secure. It would have been had I been a
Martian, but I had to smile at the puny strands that confined my
wrists. When the time came I could snap them as they had been cotton
string.
The girl they bound also, and then they fastened us together. In the
meantime they had brought our craft alongside the disabled battleship,
and soon we were transported to the latter’s deck.
Fully a thousand black men manned the great engine of destruction. Her
decks were crowded with them as they pressed forward as far as
discipline would permit to get a glimpse of their captives.
The girl’s beauty elicited many brutal comments and vulgar jests. It
was evident that these self-thought supermen were far inferior to the
red men of Barsoom in refinement and in chivalry.
My close-cropped black hair and thern complexion were the subjects of
much comment. When Xodar told his fellow nobles of my fighting ability
and strange origin they crowded about me with numerous questions.
The fact that I wore the harness and metal of a thern who had been
killed by a member of my party convinced them that I was an enemy of
their hereditary foes, and placed me on a better footing in their
estimation.
Without exception the blacks were handsome men, and well built. The
officers were conspicuous through the wondrous magnificence of their
resplendent trappings. Many harnesses were so encrusted with gold,
platinum, silver and precious stones as to entirely hide the leather
beneath.
The harness of the commanding officer was a solid mass of diamonds.
Against the ebony background of his skin they blazed out with a
peculiarly accentuated effulgence. The whole scene was enchanting. The
handsome men; the barbaric splendour of the accoutrements; the polished
skeel wood of the deck; the gloriously grained sorapus of the cabins,
inlaid with priceless jewels and precious metals in intricate and
beautiful design; the burnished gold of hand rails; the shining metal
of the guns.
Phaidor and I were taken below decks, where, still fast bound, we were
thrown into a small compartment which contained a single port-hole. As
our escort left us they barred the door behind them.
We could hear the men working on the broken propellers, and from the
port-hole we could see that the vessel was drifting lazily toward the
south.
For some time neither of us spoke. Each was occupied with his own
thoughts. For my part I was wondering as to the fate of Tars Tarkas and
the girl, Thuvia.
Even if they succeeded in eluding pursuit they must eventually fall
into the hands of either red men or green, and as fugitives from the
Valley Dor they could look for but little else than a swift and
terrible death.
How I wished that I might have accompanied them. It seemed to me that I
could not fail to impress upon the intelligent red men of Barsoom the
wicked deception that a cruel and senseless superstition had foisted
upon them.
Tardos Mors would believe me. Of that I was positive. And that he would
have the courage of his convictions my knowledge of his character
assured me. Dejah Thoris would believe me. Not a doubt as to that
entered my head. Then there were a thousand of my red and green warrior
friends whom I knew would face eternal damnation gladly for my sake.
Like Tars Tarkas, where I led they would follow.
My only danger lay in that should I ever escape the black pirates it
might be to fall into the hands of unfriendly red or green men. Then it
would mean short shrift for me.
Well, there seemed little to worry about on that score, for the
likelihood of my ever escaping the blacks was extremely remote.
The girl and I were linked together by a rope which permitted us to
move only about three or four feet from each other. When we had entered
the compartment we had seated ourselves upon a low bench beneath the
porthole. The bench was the only furniture of the room. It was of
sorapus wood. The floor, ceiling and walls were of carborundum
aluminum, a light, impenetrable composition extensively utilized in the
construction of Martian fighting ships.
As I had sat meditating upon the future my eyes had been riveted upon
the port-hole which was just level with them as I sat. Suddenly I
looked toward Phaidor. She was regarding me with a strange expression I
had not before seen upon her face. She was very beautiful then.
Instantly her white lids veiled her eyes, and I thought I discovered a
delicate flush tingeing her cheek. Evidently she was embarrassed at
having been detected in the act of staring at a lesser creature, I
thought.
“Do you find the study of the lower orders interesting?” I asked,
laughing.
She looked up again with a nervous but relieved little laugh.
“Oh very,” she said, “especially when they have such excellent
profiles.”
It was my turn to flush, but I did not. I felt that she was poking fun
at me, and I admired a brave heart that could look for humour on the
road to death, and so I laughed with her.
“Do you know where we are going?” she said.
“To solve the mystery of the eternal hereafter, I imagine,” I replied.
“I am going to a worse fate than that,” she said, with a little
shudder.
“What do you mean?”
“I can only guess,” she replied, “since no thern damsel of all the
millions that have been stolen away by black pirates during the ages
they have raided our domains has ever returned to narrate her
experiences among them. That they never take a man prisoner lends
strength to the belief that the fate of the girls they steal is worse
than death.”
“Is it not a just retribution?” I could not help but ask.
“What do you mean?”
“Do not the therns themselves do likewise with the poor creatures who
take the voluntary pilgrimage down the River of Mystery? Was not Thuvia
for fifteen years a plaything and a slave? Is it less than just that
you should suffer as you have caused others to suffer?”
“You do not understand,” she replied. “We therns are a holy race. It is
an honour to a lesser creature to be a slave among us. Did we not
occasionally save a few of the lower orders that stupidly float down an
unknown river to an unknown end all would become the prey of the plant
men and the apes.”
“But do you not by every means encourage the superstition among those
of the outside world?” I argued. “That is the wickedest of your deeds.
Can you tell me why you foster the cruel deception?”
“All life on Barsoom,” she said, “is created solely for the support of
the race of therns. How else could we live did the outer world not
furnish our labour and our food? Think you that a thern would demean
himself by labour?”
“It is true then that you eat human flesh?” I asked in horror.
She looked at me in pitying commiseration for my ignorance.
“Truly we eat the flesh of the lower orders. Do not you also?”
“The flesh of beasts, yes,” I replied, “but not the flesh of man.”
“As man may eat of the flesh of beasts, so may gods eat of the flesh of
man. The Holy Therns are the gods of Barsoom.”
I was disgusted and I imagine that I showed it.
“You are an unbeliever now,” she continued gently, “but should we be
fortunate enough to escape the clutches of the black pirates and come
again to the court of Matai Shang I think that we shall find an
argument to convince you of the error of your ways. And—,” she
hesitated, “perhaps we shall find a way to keep you as—as—one of us.”
Again her eyes dropped to the floor, and a faint colour suffused her
cheek. I could not understand her meaning; nor did I for a long time.
Dejah Thoris was wont to say that in some things I was a veritable
simpleton, and I guess that she was right.
“I fear that I would ill requite your father’s hospitality,” I
answered, “since the first thing that I should do were I a thern would
be to set an armed guard at the mouth of the River Iss to escort the
poor deluded voyagers back to the outer world. Also should I devote my
life to the extermination of the hideous plant men and their horrible
companions, the great white apes.”
She looked at me really horror struck.
“No, no,” she cried, “you must not say such terribly sacrilegious
things—you must not even think them. Should they ever guess that you
entertained such frightful thoughts, should we chance to regain the
temples of the therns, they would mete out a frightful death to you.
Not even my—my—” Again she flushed, and started over. “Not even I could
save you.”
I said no more. Evidently it was useless. She was even more steeped in
superstition than the Martians of the outer world. They only worshipped
a beautiful hope for a life of love and peace and happiness in the
hereafter. The therns worshipped the hideous plant men and the apes, or
at least they reverenced them as the abodes of the departed spirits of
their own dead.
At this point the door of our prison opened to admit Xodar.
He smiled pleasantly at me, and when he smiled his expression was
kindly—anything but cruel or vindictive.
“Since you cannot escape under any circumstances,” he said, “I cannot
see the necessity for keeping you confined below. I will cut your bonds
and you may come on deck. You will witness something very interesting,
and as you never shall return to the outer world it will do no harm to
permit you to see it. You will see what no other than the First Born
and their slaves know the existence of—the subterranean entrance to the
Holy Land, to the real heaven of Barsoom.
“It will be an excellent lesson for this daughter of the therns,” he
added, “for she shall see the Temple of Issus, and Issus, perchance,
shall embrace her.”
Phaidor’s head went high.
“What blasphemy is this, dog of a pirate?” she cried. “Issus would wipe
out your entire breed an’ you ever came within sight of her temple.”
“You have much to learn, thern,” replied Xodar, with an ugly smile,
“nor do I envy you the manner in which you will learn it.”
As we came on deck I saw to my surprise that the vessel was passing
over a great field of snow and ice. As far as the eye could reach in
any direction naught else was visible.
There could be but one solution to the mystery. We were above the south
polar ice cap. Only at the poles of Mars is there ice or snow upon the
planet. No sign of life appeared below us. Evidently we were too far
south even for the great fur-bearing animals which the Martians so
delight in hunting.
Xodar was at my side as I stood looking out over the ship’s rail.
“What course?” I asked him.
“A little west of south,” he replied. “You will see the Otz Valley
directly. We shall skirt it for a few hundred miles.”
“The Otz Valley!” I exclaimed; “but, man, is not there where lie the
domains of the therns from which I but just escaped?”
“Yes,” answered Xodar. “You crossed this ice field last night in the
long chase that you led us. The Otz Valley lies in a mighty depression
at the south pole. It is sunk thousands of feet below the level of the
surrounding country, like a great round bowl. A hundred miles from its
northern boundary rise the Otz Mountains which circle the inner Valley
of Dor, in the exact centre of which lies the Lost Sea of Korus. On the
shore of this sea stands the Golden Temple of Issus in the Land of the
First Born. It is there that we are bound.”
As I looked I commenced to realize why it was that in all the ages only
one had escaped from the Valley Dor. My only wonder was that even the
one had been successful. To cross this frozen, wind-swept waste of
bleak ice alone and on foot would be impossible.
“Only by air boat could the journey be made,” I finished aloud.
“It was thus that one did escape the therns in bygone times; but none
has ever escaped the First Born,” said Xodar, with a touch of pride in
his voice.
We had now reached the southernmost extremity of the great ice barrier.
It ended abruptly in a sheer wall thousands of feet high at the base of
which stretched a level valley, broken here and there by low rolling
hills and little clumps of forest, and with tiny rivers formed by the
melting of the ice barrier at its base.
Once we passed far above what seemed to be a deep canyon-like rift
stretching from the ice wall on the north across the valley as far as
the eye could reach. “That is the bed of the River Iss,” said Xodar.
“It runs far beneath the ice field, and below the level of the Valley
Otz, but its canyon is open here.”
Presently I descried what I took to be a village, and pointing it out
to Xodar asked him what it might be.
“It is a village of lost souls,” he answered, laughing. “This strip
between the ice barrier and the mountains is considered neutral ground.
Some turn off from their voluntary pilgrimage down the Iss, and,
scaling the awful walls of its canyon below us, stop in the valley.
Also a slave now and then escapes from the therns and makes his way
hither.
“They do not attempt to recapture such, since there is no escape from
this outer valley, and as a matter of fact they fear the patrolling
cruisers of the First Born too much to venture from their own domains.
“The poor creatures of this outer valley are not molested by us since
they have nothing that we desire, nor are they numerically strong
enough to give us an interesting fight—so we too leave them alone.
“There are several villages of them, but they have increased in numbers
but little in many years since they are always warring among
themselves.”
Now we swung a little north of west, leaving the valley of lost souls,
and shortly I discerned over our starboard bow what appeared to be a
black mountain rising from the desolate waste of ice. It was not high
and seemed to have a flat top.
Xodar had left us to attend to some duty on the vessel, and Phaidor and
I stood alone beside the rail. The girl had not once spoken since we
had been brought to the deck.
“Is what he has been telling me true?” I asked her.
“In part, yes,” she answered. “That about the outer valley is true, but
what he says of the location of the Temple of Issus in the centre of
his country is false. If it is not false—” she hesitated. “Oh it cannot
be true, it cannot be true. For if it were true then for countless ages
have my people gone to torture and ignominious death at the hands of
their cruel enemies, instead of to the beautiful Life Eternal that we
have been taught to believe Issus holds for us.”
“As the lesser Barsoomians of the outer world have been lured by you to
the terrible Valley Dor, so may it be that the therns themselves have
been lured by the First Born to an equally horrid fate,” I suggested.
“It would be a stern and awful retribution, Phaidor; but a just one.”
“I cannot believe it,” she said.
“We shall see,” I answered, and then we fell silent again for we were
rapidly approaching the black mountains, which in some indefinable way
seemed linked with the answer to our problem.
As we neared the dark, truncated cone the vessel’s speed was diminished
until we barely moved. Then we topped the crest of the mountain and
below us I saw yawning the mouth of a huge circular well, the bottom of
which was lost in inky blackness.
The diameter of this enormous pit was fully a thousand feet. The walls
were smooth and appeared to be composed of a black, basaltic rock.
For a moment the vessel hovered motionless directly above the centre of
the gaping void, then slowly she began to settle into the black chasm.
Lower and lower she sank until as darkness enveloped us her lights were
thrown on and in the dim halo of her own radiance the monster
battleship dropped on and on down into what seemed to me must be the
very bowels of Barsoom.
For quite half an hour we descended and then the shaft terminated
abruptly in the dome of a mighty subterranean world. Below us rose and
fell the billows of a buried sea. A phosphorescent radiance illuminated
the scene. Thousands of ships dotted the bosom of the ocean. Little
islands rose here and there to support the strange and colourless
vegetation of this strange world.
Slowly and with majestic grace the battleship dropped until she rested
on the water. Her great propellers had been drawn and housed during our
descent of the shaft and in their place had been run out the smaller
but more powerful water propellers. As these commenced to revolve the
ship took up its journey once more, riding the new element as buoyantly
and as safely as she had the air.
Phaidor and I were dumbfounded. Neither had either heard or dreamed
that such a world existed beneath the surface of Barsoom.
Nearly all the vessels we saw were war craft. There were a few lighters
and barges, but none of the great merchantmen such as ply the upper air
between the cities of the outer world.
“Here is the harbour of the navy of the First Born,” said a voice
behind us, and turning we saw Xodar watching us with an amused smile on
his lips.
“This sea,” he continued, “is larger than Korus. It receives the waters
of the lesser sea above it. To keep it from filling above a certain
level we have four great pumping stations that force the oversupply
back into the reservoirs far north from which the red men draw the
water which irrigates their farm lands.”
A new light burst on me with this explanation. The red men had always
considered it a miracle that caused great columns of water to spurt
from the solid rock of their reservoir sides to increase the supply of
the precious liquid which is so scarce in the outer world of Mars.
Never had their learned men been able to fathom the secret of the
source of this enormous volume of water. As ages passed they had simply
come to accept it as a matter of course and ceased to question its
origin.
We passed several islands on which were strangely shaped circular
buildings, apparently roofless, and pierced midway between the ground
and their tops with small, heavily barred windows. They bore the
earmarks of prisons, which were further accentuated by the armed guards
who squatted on low benches without, or patrolled the short beach
lines.
Few of these islets contained over an acre of ground, but presently we
sighted a much larger one directly ahead. This proved to be our
destination, and the great ship was soon made fast against the steep
shore.
Xodar signalled us to follow him and with a half-dozen officers and men
we left the battleship and approached a large oval structure a couple
of hundred yards from the shore.
“You shall soon see Issus,” said Xodar to Phaidor. “The few prisoners
we take are presented to her. Occasionally she selects slaves from
among them to replenish the ranks of her handmaidens. None serves Issus
above a single year,” and there was a grim smile on the black’s lips
that lent a cruel and sinister meaning to his simple statement.
Phaidor, though loath to believe that Issus was allied to such as
these, had commenced to entertain doubts and fears. She clung very
closely to me, no longer the proud daughter of the Master of Life and
Death upon Barsoom, but a young and frightened girl in the power of
relentless enemies.
The building which we now entered was entirely roofless. In its centre
was a long tank of water, set below the level of the floor like the
swimming pool of a natatorium. Near one side of the pool floated an
odd-looking black object. Whether it were some strange monster of these
buried waters, or a queer raft, I could not at once perceive.
We were soon to know, however, for as we reached the edge of the pool
directly above the thing, Xodar cried out a few words in a strange
tongue. Immediately a hatch cover was raised from the surface of the
object, and a black seaman sprang from the bowels of the strange craft.
Xodar addressed the seaman.
“Transmit to your officer,” he said, “the commands of Dator Xodar. Say
to him that Dator Xodar, with officers and men, escorting two
prisoners, would be transported to the gardens of Issus beside the
Golden Temple.”
“Blessed be the shell of thy first ancestor, most noble Dator,” replied
the man. “It shall be done even as thou sayest,” and raising both
hands, palms backward, above his head after the manner of salute which
is common to all races of Barsoom, he disappeared once more into the
entrails of his ship.
A moment later an officer resplendent in the gorgeous trappings of his
rank appeared on deck and welcomed Xodar to the vessel, and in the
latter’s wake we filed aboard and below.
The cabin in which we found ourselves extended entirely across the
ship, having port-holes on either side below the water line. No sooner
were all below than a number of commands were given, in accordance with
which the hatch was closed and secured, and the vessel commenced to
vibrate to the rhythmic purr of its machinery.
“Where can we be going in such a tiny pool of water?” asked Phaidor.
“Not up,” I replied, “for I noticed particularly that while the
building is roofless it is covered with a strong metal grating.”
“Then where?” she asked again.
“From the appearance of the craft I judge we are going down,” I
replied.
Phaidor shuddered. For such long ages have the waters of Barsoom’s seas
been a thing of tradition only that even this daughter of the therns,
born as she had been within sight of Mars’ only remaining sea, had the
same terror of deep water as is a common attribute of all Martians.
Presently the sensation of sinking became very apparent. We were going
down swiftly. Now we could hear the water rushing past the port-holes,
and in the dim light that filtered through them to the water beyond the
swirling eddies were plainly visible.
Phaidor grasped my arm.
“Save me!” she whispered. “Save me and your every wish shall be
granted. Anything within the power of the Holy Therns to give will be
yours. Phaidor—” she stumbled a little here, and then in a very low
voice, “Phaidor already is yours.”
I felt very sorry for the poor child, and placed my hand over hers
where it rested on my arm. I presume my motive was misunderstood, for
with a swift glance about the apartment to assure herself that we were
alone, she threw both her arms about my neck and dragged my face down
to hers.
CHAPTER IX
ISSUS, GODDESS OF LIFE ETERNAL
The confession of love which the girl’s fright had wrung from her
touched me deeply; but it humiliated me as well, since I felt that in
some thoughtless word or act I had given her reason to believe that I
reciprocated her affection.
Never have I been much of a ladies’ man, being more concerned with
fighting and kindred arts which have ever seemed to me more befitting a
man than mooning over a scented glove four sizes too small for him, or
kissing a dead flower that has begun to smell like a cabbage. So I was
quite at a loss as to what to do or say. A thousand times rather face
the wild hordes of the dead sea bottoms than meet the eyes of this
beautiful young girl and tell her the thing that I must tell her.
But there was nothing else to be done, and so I did it. Very clumsily
too, I fear.
Gently I unclasped her hands from about my neck, and still holding them
in mine I told her the story of my love for Dejah Thoris. That of all
the women of two worlds that I had known and admired during my long
life she alone had I loved.
The tale did not seem to please her. Like a tigress she sprang,
panting, to her feet. Her beautiful face was distorted in an expression
of horrible malevolence. Her eyes fairly blazed into mine.
“Dog,” she hissed. “Dog of a blasphemer! Think you that Phaidor,
daughter of Matai Shang, supplicates? She commands. What to her is your
puny outer world passion for the vile creature you chose in your other
life?
“Phaidor has glorified you with her love, and you have spurned her. Ten
thousand unthinkably atrocious deaths could not atone for the affront
that you have put upon me. The thing that you call Dejah Thoris shall
die the most horrible of them all. You have sealed the warrant for her
doom.
“And you! You shall be the meanest slave in the service of the goddess
you have attempted to humiliate. Tortures and ignominies shall be
heaped upon you until you grovel at my feet asking the boon of death.
“In my gracious generosity I shall at length grant your prayer, and
from the high balcony of the Golden Cliffs I shall watch the great
white apes tear you asunder.”
She had it all fixed up. The whole lovely programme from start to
finish. It amazed me to think that one so divinely beautiful could at
the same time be so fiendishly vindictive. It occurred to me, however,
that she had overlooked one little factor in her revenge, and so,
without any intent to add to her discomfiture, but rather to permit her
to rearrange her plans along more practical lines, I pointed to the
nearest port-hole.
Evidently she had entirely forgotten her surroundings and her present
circumstances, for a single glance at the dark, swirling waters without
sent her crumpled upon a low bench, where with her face buried in her
arms she sobbed more like a very unhappy little girl than a proud and
all-powerful goddess.
Down, down we continued to sink until the heavy glass of the port-holes
became noticeably warm from the heat of the water without. Evidently we
were very far beneath the surface crust of Mars.
Presently our downward motion ceased, and I could hear the propellers
swirling through the water at our stern and forcing us ahead at high
speed. It was very dark down there, but the light from our port-holes,
and the reflection from what must have been a powerful searchlight on
the submarine’s nose showed that we were forging through a narrow
passage, rock-lined, and tube-like.
After a few minutes the propellers ceased their whirring. We came to a
full stop, and then commenced to rise swiftly toward the surface. Soon
the light from without increased and we came to a stop.
Xodar entered the cabin with his men.
“Come,” he said, and we followed him through the hatchway which had
been opened by one of the seamen.
We found ourselves in a small subterranean vault, in the centre of
which was the pool in which lay our submarine, floating as we had first
seen her with only her black back showing.
Around the edge of the pool was a level platform, and then the walls of
the cave rose perpendicularly for a few feet to arch toward the centre
of the low roof. The walls about the ledge were pierced with a number
of entrances to dimly lighted passageways.
Toward one of these our captors led us, and after a short walk halted
before a steel cage which lay at the bottom of a shaft rising above us
as far as one could see.
The cage proved to be one of the common types of elevator cars that I
had seen in other parts of Barsoom. They are operated by means of
enormous magnets which are suspended at the top of the shaft. By an
electrical device the volume of magnetism generated is regulated and
the speed of the car varied.
In long stretches they move at a sickening speed, especially on the
upward trip, since the small force of gravity inherent to Mars results
in very little opposition to the powerful force above.
Scarcely had the door of the car closed behind us than we were slowing
up to stop at the landing above, so rapid was our ascent of the long
shaft.
When we emerged from the little building which houses the upper
terminus of the elevator, we found ourselves in the midst of a
veritable fairyland of beauty. The combined languages of Earth men hold
no words to convey to the mind the gorgeous beauties of the scene.
One may speak of scarlet sward and ivory-stemmed trees decked with
brilliant purple blooms; of winding walks paved with crushed rubies,
with emerald, with turquoise, even with diamonds themselves; of a
magnificent temple of burnished gold, hand-wrought with marvellous
designs; but where are the words to describe the glorious colours that
are unknown to earthly eyes? where the mind or the imagination that can
grasp the gorgeous scintillations of unheard-of rays as they emanate
from the thousand nameless jewels of Barsoom?
Even my eyes, for long years accustomed to the barbaric splendours of a
Martian Jeddak’s court, were amazed at the glory of the scene.
Phaidor’s eyes were wide in amazement.
“The Temple of Issus,” she whispered, half to herself.
Xodar watched us with his grim smile, partly of amusement and partly
malicious gloating.
The gardens swarmed with brilliantly trapped black men and women. Among
them moved red and white females serving their every want. The places
of the outer world and the temples of the therns had been robbed of
their princesses and goddesses that the blacks might have their slaves.
Through this scene we moved toward the temple. At the main entrance we
were halted by a cordon of armed guards. Xodar spoke a few words to an
officer who came forward to question us. Together they entered the
temple, where they remained for some time.
When they returned it was to announce that Issus desired to look upon
the daughter of Matai Shang, and the strange creature from another
world who had been a Prince of Helium.
Slowly we moved through endless corridors of unthinkable beauty;
through magnificent apartments, and noble halls. At length we were
halted in a spacious chamber in the centre of the temple. One of the
officers who had accompanied us advanced to a large door in the further
end of the chamber. Here he must have made some sort of signal for
immediately the door opened and another richly trapped courtier
emerged.
We were then led up to the door, where we were directed to get down on
our hands and knees with our backs toward the room we were to enter.
The doors were swung open and after being cautioned not to turn our
heads under penalty of instant death we were commanded to back into the
presence of Issus.
Never have I been in so humiliating a position in my life, and only my
love for Dejah Thoris and the hope which still clung to me that I might
again see her kept me from rising to face the goddess of the First Born
and go down to my death like a gentleman, facing my foes and with their
blood mingling with mine.
After we had crawled in this disgusting fashion for a matter of a
couple of hundred feet we were halted by our escort.
“Let them rise,” said a voice behind us; a thin, wavering voice, yet
one that had evidently been accustomed to command for many years.
“Rise,” said our escort, “but do not face toward Issus.”
“The woman pleases me,” said the thin, wavering voice again after a few
moments of silence. “She shall serve me the allotted time. The man you
may return to the Isle of Shador which lies against the northern shore
of the Sea of Omean. Let the woman turn and look upon Issus, knowing
that those of the lower orders who gaze upon the holy vision of her
radiant face survive the blinding glory but a single year.”
I watched Phaidor from the corner of my eye. She paled to a ghastly
hue. Slowly, very slowly she turned, as though drawn by some invisible
yet irresistible force. She was standing quite close to me, so close
that her bare arm touched mine as she finally faced Issus, Goddess of
Life Eternal.
I could not see the girl’s face as her eyes rested for the first time
on the Supreme Deity of Mars, but felt the shudder that ran through her
in the trembling flesh of the arm that touched mine.
“It must be dazzling loveliness indeed,” thought I, “to cause such
emotion in the breast of so radiant a beauty as Phaidor, daughter of
Matai Shang.”
“Let the woman remain. Remove the man. Go.” Thus spoke Issus, and the
heavy hand of the officer fell upon my shoulder. In accordance with his
instructions I dropped to my hands and knees once more and crawled from
the Presence. It had been my first audience with deity, but I am free
to confess that I was not greatly impressed—other than with the
ridiculous figure I cut scrambling about on my marrow bones.
Once without the chamber the doors closed behind us and I was bid to
rise. Xodar joined me and together we slowly retraced our steps toward
the gardens.
“You spared my life when you easily might have taken it,” he said after
we had proceeded some little way in silence, “and I would aid you if I
might. I can help to make your life here more bearable, but your fate
is inevitable. You may never hope to return to the outer world.”
“What will be my fate?” I asked.
“That will depend largely upon Issus. So long as she does not send for
you and reveal her face to you, you may live on for years in as mild a
form of bondage as I can arrange for you.”
“Why should she send for me?” I asked.
“The men of the lower orders she often uses for various purposes of
amusement. Such a fighter as you, for example, would render fine sport
in the monthly rites of the temple. There are men pitted against men,
and against beasts for the edification of Issus and the replenishment
of her larder.”
“She eats human flesh?” I asked. Not in horror, however, for since my
recently acquired knowledge of the Holy Therns I was prepared for
anything in this still less accessible heaven, where all was evidently
dictated by a single omnipotence; where ages of narrow fanaticism and
self-worship had eradicated all the broader humanitarian instincts that
the race might once have possessed.
They were a people drunk with power and success, looking upon the other
inhabitants of Mars as we look upon the beasts of the field and the
forest. Why then should they not eat of the flesh of the lower orders
whose lives and characters they no more understood than do we the
inmost thoughts and sensibilities of the cattle we slaughter for our
earthly tables.
“She eats only the flesh of the best bred of the Holy Therns and the
red Barsoomians. The flesh of the others goes to our boards. The
animals are eaten by the slaves. She also eats other dainties.”
I did not understand then that there lay any special significance in
his reference to other dainties. I thought the limit of ghoulishness
already had been reached in the recitation of Issus’ menu. I still had
much to learn as to the depths of cruelty and bestiality to which
omnipotence may drag its possessor.
We had about reached the last of the many chambers and corridors which
led to the gardens when an officer overtook us.
“Issus would look again upon this man,” he said. “The girl has told her
that he is of wondrous beauty and of such prowess that alone he slew
seven of the First Born, and with his bare hands took Xodar captive,
binding him with his own harness.”
Xodar looked uncomfortable. Evidently he did not relish the thought
that Issus had learned of his inglorious defeat.
Without a word he turned and we followed the officer once again to the
closed doors before the audience chamber of Issus, Goddess of Life
Eternal.
Here the ceremony of entrance was repeated. Again Issus bid me rise.
For several minutes all was silent as the tomb. The eyes of deity were
appraising me.
Presently the thin wavering voice broke the stillness, repeating in a
singsong drone the words which for countless ages had sealed the doom
of numberless victims.
“Let the man turn and look upon Issus, knowing that those of the lower
orders who gaze upon the holy vision of her radiant face survive the
blinding glory but a single year.”
I turned as I had been bid, expecting such a treat as only the
revealment of divine glory to mortal eyes might produce. What I saw was
a solid phalanx of armed men between myself and a dais supporting a
great bench of carved sorapus wood. On this bench, or throne, squatted
a female black. She was evidently very old. Not a hair remained upon
her wrinkled skull. With the exception of two yellow fangs she was
entirely toothless. On either side of her thin, hawk-like nose her eyes
burned from the depths of horribly sunken sockets. The skin of her face
was seamed and creased with a million deepcut furrows. Her body was as
wrinkled as her face, and as repulsive.
Emaciated arms and legs attached to a torso which seemed to be mostly
distorted abdomen completed the “holy vision of her radiant beauty.”
Surrounding her were a number of female slaves, among them Phaidor,
white and trembling.
“This is the man who slew seven of the First Born and, bare-handed,
bound Dator Xodar with his own harness?” asked Issus.
“Most glorious vision of divine loveliness, it is,” replied the officer
who stood at my side.
“Produce Dator Xodar,” she commanded.
Xodar was brought from the adjoining room.
Issus glared at him, a baleful light in her hideous eyes.
“And such as you are a Dator of the First Born?” she squealed. “For the
disgrace you have brought upon the Immortal Race you shall be degraded
to a rank below the lowest. No longer be you a Dator, but for evermore
a slave of slaves, to fetch and carry for the lower orders that serve
in the gardens of Issus. Remove his harness. Cowards and slaves wear no
trappings.”
Xodar stood stiffly erect. Not a muscle twitched, nor a tremor shook
his giant frame as a soldier of the guard roughly stripped his gorgeous
trappings from him.
“Begone,” screamed the infuriated little old woman. “Begone, but
instead of the light of the gardens of Issus let you serve as a slave
of this slave who conquered you in the prison on the Isle of Shador in
the Sea of Omean. Take him away out of the sight of my divine eyes.”
Slowly and with high held head the proud Xodar turned and stalked from
the chamber. Issus rose and turned to leave the room by another exit.
Turning to me, she said: “You shall be returned to Shador for the
present. Later Issus will see the manner of your fighting. Go.” Then
she disappeared, followed by her retinue. Only Phaidor lagged behind,
and as I started to follow my guard toward the gardens, the girl came
running after me.
“Oh, do not leave me in this terrible place,” she begged. “Forgive the
things I said to you, my Prince. I did not mean them. Only take me away
with you. Let me share your imprisonment on Shador.” Her words were an
almost incoherent volley of thoughts, so rapidly she spoke. “You did
not understand the honour that I did you. Among the therns there is no
marriage or giving in marriage, as among the lower orders of the outer
world. We might have lived together for ever in love and happiness. We
have both looked upon Issus and in a year we die. Let us live that year
at least together in what measure of joy remains for the doomed.”
“If it was difficult for me to understand you, Phaidor,” I replied,
“can you not understand that possibly it is equally difficult for you
to understand the motives, the customs and the social laws that guide
me? I do not wish to hurt you, nor to seem to undervalue the honour
which you have done me, but the thing you desire may not be. Regardless
of the foolish belief of the peoples of the outer world, or of Holy
Thern, or ebon First Born, I am not dead. While I live my heart beats
for but one woman—the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium.
When death overtakes me my heart shall have ceased to beat; but what
comes after that I know not. And in that I am as wise as Matai Shang,
Master of Life and Death upon Barsoom; or Issus, Goddess of Life
Eternal.”
Phaidor stood looking at me intently for a moment. No anger showed in
her eyes this time, only a pathetic expression of hopeless sorrow.
“I do not understand,” she said, and turning walked slowly in the
direction of the door through which Issus and her retinue had passed. A
moment later she had passed from my sight.
CHAPTER X
THE PRISON ISLE OF SHADOR
In the outer gardens to which the guard now escorted me, I found Xodar
surrounded by a crowd of noble blacks. They were reviling and cursing
him. The men slapped his face. The women spat upon him.
When I appeared they turned their attentions toward me.
“Ah,” cried one, “so this is the creature who overcame the great Xodar
bare-handed. Let us see how it was done.”
“Let him bind Thurid,” suggested a beautiful woman, laughing. “Thurid
is a noble Dator. Let Thurid show the dog what it means to face a real
man.”
“Yes, Thurid! Thurid!” cried a dozen voices.
“Here he is now,” exclaimed another, and turning in the direction
indicated I saw a huge black weighed down with resplendent ornaments
and arms advancing with noble and gallant bearing toward us.
“What now?” he cried. “What would you of Thurid?”
Quickly a dozen voices explained.
Thurid turned toward Xodar, his eyes narrowing to two nasty slits.
“Calot!” he hissed. “Ever did I think you carried the heart of a sorak
in your putrid breast. Often have you bested me in the secret councils
of Issus, but now in the field of war where men are truly gauged your
scabby heart hath revealed its sores to all the world. Calot, I spurn
you with my foot,” and with the words he turned to kick Xodar.
My blood was up. For minutes it had been boiling at the cowardly
treatment they had been according this once powerful comrade because he
had fallen from the favour of Issus. I had no love for Xodar, but I
cannot stand the sight of cowardly injustice and persecution without
seeing red as through a haze of bloody mist, and doing things on the
impulse of the moment that I presume I never should do after mature
deliberation.
I was standing close beside Xodar as Thurid swung his foot for the
cowardly kick. The degraded Dator stood erect and motionless as a
carven image. He was prepared to take whatever his former comrades had
to offer in the way of insults and reproaches, and take them in manly
silence and stoicism.
But as Thurid’s foot swung so did mine, and I caught him a painful blow
upon the shin bone that saved Xodar from this added ignominy.
For a moment there was tense silence, then Thurid, with a roar of rage
sprang for my throat; just as Xodar had upon the deck of the cruiser.
The results were identical. I ducked beneath his outstretched arms, and
as he lunged past me planted a terrific right on the side of his jaw.
The big fellow spun around like a top, his knees gave beneath him and
he crumpled to the ground at my feet.
The blacks gazed in astonishment, first at the still form of the proud
Dator lying there in the ruby dust of the pathway, then at me as though
they could not believe that such a thing could be.
“You asked me to bind Thurid,” I cried; “behold!” And then I stooped
beside the prostrate form, tore the harness from it, and bound the
fellow’s arms and legs securely.
“As you have done to Xodar, now do you likewise to Thurid. Take him
before Issus, bound in his own harness, that she may see with her own
eyes that there be one among you now who is greater than the First
Born.”
“Who are you?” whispered the woman who had first suggested that I
attempt to bind Thurid.
“I am a citizen of two worlds; Captain John Carter of Virginia, Prince
of the House of Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium. Take this man to your
goddess, as I have said, and tell her, too, that as I have done to
Xodar and Thurid, so also can I do to the mightiest of her Dators. With
naked hands, with long-sword or with short-sword, I challenge the
flower of her fighting-men to combat.”
“Come,” said the officer who was guarding me back to Shador; “my orders
are imperative; there is to be no delay. Xodar, come you also.”
There was little of disrespect in the tone that the man used in
addressing either Xodar or myself. It was evident that he felt less
contempt for the former Dator since he had witnessed the ease with
which I disposed of the powerful Thurid.
That his respect for me was greater than it should have been for a
slave was quite apparent from the fact that during the balance of the
return journey he walked or stood always behind me, a drawn short-sword
in his hand.
The return to the Sea of Omean was uneventful. We dropped down the
awful shaft in the same car that had brought us to the surface. There
we entered the submarine, taking the long dive to the tunnel far
beneath the upper world. Then through the tunnel and up again to the
pool from which we had had our first introduction to the wonderful
passageway from Omean to the Temple of Issus.
From the island of the submarine we were transported on a small cruiser
to the distant Isle of Shador. Here we found a small stone prison and a
guard of half a dozen blacks. There was no ceremony wasted in
completing our incarceration. One of the blacks opened the door of the
prison with a huge key, we walked in, the door closed behind us, the
lock grated, and with the sound there swept over me again that terrible
feeling of hopelessness that I had felt in the Chamber of Mystery in
the Golden Cliffs beneath the gardens of the Holy Therns.
Then Tars Tarkas had been with me, but now I was utterly alone in so
far as friendly companionship was concerned. I fell to wondering about
the fate of the great Thark, and of his beautiful companion, the girl,
Thuvia. Even should they by some miracle have escaped and been received
and spared by a friendly nation, what hope had I of the succour which I
knew they would gladly extend if it lay in their power.
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