The Gods of Mars | Page 3

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