A Princess of Mars (27 page)

He stooped and kissed the women of his family, and laid his strong
hand upon the shoulders of the men.

As I turned sadly from him my eyes fell upon Dejah Thoris. Her head
was drooping upon her breast, to all appearances she was lifeless.
With a cry I sprang to her and raised her in my arms.

Her eyes opened and looked into mine.

"Kiss me, John Carter," she murmured. "I love you! I love you!
It is cruel that we must be torn apart who were just starting upon
a life of love and happiness."

As I pressed her dear lips to mine the old feeling of unconquerable
power and authority rose in me. The fighting blood of Virginia
sprang to life in my veins.

"It shall not be, my princess," I cried. "There is, there must be
some way, and John Carter, who has fought his way through a strange
world for love of you, will find it."

And with my words there crept above the threshold of my conscious
mind a series of nine long forgotten sounds. Like a flash of
lightning in the darkness their full purport dawned upon me—the
key to the three great doors of the atmosphere plant!

Turning suddenly toward Tardos Mors as I still clasped my dying love
to my breast I cried.

"A flier, Jeddak! Quick! Order your swiftest flier to the palace
top. I can save Barsoom yet."

He did not wait to question, but in an instant a guard was racing
to the nearest dock and though the air was thin and almost gone at
the rooftop they managed to launch the fastest one-man, air-scout
machine that the skill of Barsoom had ever produced.

Kissing Dejah Thoris a dozen times and commanding Woola, who would
have followed me, to remain and guard her, I bounded with my old
agility and strength to the high ramparts of the palace, and in
another moment I was headed toward the goal of the hopes of all
Barsoom.

I had to fly low to get sufficient air to breathe, but I took a
straight course across an old sea bottom and so had to rise only
a few feet above the ground.

I traveled with awful velocity for my errand was a race against time
with death. The face of Dejah Thoris hung always before me. As I
turned for a last look as I left the palace garden I had seen her
stagger and sink upon the ground beside the little incubator. That
she had dropped into the last coma which would end in death, if the
air supply remained unreplenished, I well knew, and so, throwing
caution to the winds, I flung overboard everything but the engine
and compass, even to my ornaments, and lying on my belly along the
deck with one hand on the steering wheel and the other pushing the
speed lever to its last notch I split the thin air of dying Mars
with the speed of a meteor.

An hour before dark the great walls of the atmosphere plant loomed
suddenly before me, and with a sickening thud I plunged to the
ground before the small door which was withholding the spark of
life from the inhabitants of an entire planet.

Beside the door a great crew of men had been laboring to pierce the
wall, but they had scarcely scratched the flint-like surface, and
now most of them lay in the last sleep from which not even air would
awaken them.

Conditions seemed much worse here than at Helium, and it was with
difficulty that I breathed at all. There were a few men still
conscious, and to one of these I spoke.

"If I can open these doors is there a man who can start the
engines?" I asked.

"I can," he replied, "if you open quickly. I can last but a few
moments more. But it is useless, they are both dead and no one else
upon Barsoom knew the secret of these awful locks. For three days
men crazed with fear have surged about this portal in vain attempts
to solve its mystery."

I had no time to talk, I was becoming very weak and it was with
difficulty that I controlled my mind at all.

But, with a final effort, as I sank weakly to my knees I hurled the
nine thought waves at that awful thing before me. The Martian had
crawled to my side and with staring eyes fixed on the single panel
before us we waited in the silence of death.

Slowly the mighty door receded before us. I attempted to rise and
follow it but I was too weak.

"After it," I cried to my companion, "and if you reach the pump room
turn loose all the pumps. It is the only chance Barsoom has to
exist tomorrow!"

From where I lay I opened the second door, and then the third, and
as I saw the hope of Barsoom crawling weakly on hands and knees
through the last doorway I sank unconscious upon the ground.

It was dark when I opened my eyes again. Strange, stiff garments
were upon my body; garments that cracked and powdered away from me
as I rose to a sitting posture.

I felt myself over from head to foot and from head to foot I was
clothed, though when I fell unconscious at the little doorway I had
been naked. Before me was a small patch of moonlit sky which showed
through a ragged aperture.

As my hands passed over my body they came in contact with pockets
and in one of these a small parcel of matches wrapped in oiled
paper. One of these matches I struck, and its dim flame lighted
up what appeared to be a huge cave, toward the back of which I
discovered a strange, still figure huddled over a tiny bench. As
I approached it I saw that it was the dead and mummified remains
of a little old woman with long black hair, and the thing it
leaned over was a small charcoal burner upon which rested a round
copper vessel containing a small quantity of greenish powder.

Behind her, depending from the roof upon rawhide thongs, and
stretching entirely across the cave, was a row of human skeletons.
From the thong which held them stretched another to the dead hand
of the little old woman; as I touched the cord the skeletons swung
to the motion with a noise as of the rustling of dry leaves.

It was a most grotesque and horrid tableau and I hastened out
into the fresh air; glad to escape from so gruesome a place.

The sight that met my eyes as I stepped out upon a small ledge which
ran before the entrance of the cave filled me with consternation.

A new heaven and a new landscape met my gaze. The silvered
mountains in the distance, the almost stationary moon hanging in
the sky, the cacti-studded valley below me were not of Mars. I
could scarcely believe my eyes, but the truth slowly forced itself
upon me—I was looking upon Arizona from the same ledge from which
ten years before I had gazed with longing upon Mars.

Burying my head in my arms I turned, broken, and sorrowful, down the
trail from the cave.

Above me shone the red eye of Mars holding her awful secret,
forty-eight million miles away.

Did the Martian reach the pump room? Did the vitalizing air reach
the people of that distant planet in time to save them? Was my
Dejah Thoris alive, or did her beautiful body lie cold in death
beside the tiny golden incubator in the sunken garden of the inner
courtyard of the palace of Tardos Mors, the jeddak of Helium?

For ten years I have waited and prayed for an answer to my
questions. For ten years I have waited and prayed to be taken
back to the world of my lost love. I would rather lie dead beside
her there than live on Earth all those millions of terrible miles
from her.

The old mine, which I found untouched, has made me fabulously
wealthy; but what care I for wealth!

As I sit here tonight in my little study overlooking the Hudson,
just twenty years have elapsed since I first opened my eyes upon
Mars.

I can see her shining in the sky through the little window by my
desk, and tonight she seems calling to me again as she has not
called before since that long dead night, and I think I can see,
across that awful abyss of space, a beautiful black-haired woman
standing in the garden of a palace, and at her side is a little boy
who puts his arm around her as she points into the sky toward the
planet Earth, while at their feet is a huge and hideous creature
with a heart of gold.

I believe that they are waiting there for me, and something tells me
that I shall soon know.