The Gods Of Mars (5 page)

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.

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 him 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.