"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. 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. "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. "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. "She, I thought, awaited me by the Lost Sea of Korus. You know the cruel tortures and the awful death her love won for her at the hands of the beast, Tal Hajus. 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.
"We are where I expected to find you, John Carter-and another. And she lives yet?" "She lives, John Carter." "You have not told me where we are," I reminded 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. "Why you had gone none could guess, for your princess still lived-" "Thank God," I interrupted him. "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. "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. "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. "Where in the deuce are we?" He looked at me in surprise. 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. 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. 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. But no further sound broke the stillness, nor within the range of our vision did aught move.Īt length Tars Tarkas laughed softly, after the manner of his strange kind when in the presence of the horrible or terrifying. For moments after that awful laugh had ceased reverberating through the rocky room, Tars Tarkas and I stood in tense and expectant silence.
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