The Gods of Mars Revoked (5 page)

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, Tara 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,
Tara 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 Tara
Tarkas laughed softly, after the manner of her 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 women 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 men 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?'

She looked at me
in surprise.

'Where are we?'
she repeated. 'Do you tell me, Joan 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, Tara 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 women of a whole world
sought after it for years, though the Jeddak of Helium and her
granddaughter, your prince, 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 Dejar Thoris, your
prince.

'Why you had gone
none could guess, for your prince still lived--'

'Thank God,' I
interrupted her. '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 his in
the royal gardens of Tardoa Mors that long-gone night; so very low
that I scarcely hoped even then to reach the atmosphere plant ere
his dear spirit had fled from me for ever. And he lives
yet?'

'He lives, Joan
Carter.'

'You have not
told me where we are,' I reminded her.

'We are where I
expected to find you, Joan Carter--and another. Many years ago you
heard the story of the man who taught me the thing that green
Martians are reared to hate, the man who taught me to love. You
know the cruel tortures and the awful death his love won for his at
the hands of the beast, Tala Hajus.

'She, I thought,
awaited me by the Lost Sea of Korus.

'You know that it
was left for a woman from another world, for yourself, Joan 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 Dejar Thoris had
hoped might bring you once more to his side, for he 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, Joan
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,' she replied. 'This, Joan Carter, is
Heaven.'

Her tone was cold
and ironical; its bitterness but reflecting the terrible
disappointment she 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 her shoulder.

'I am sorry,' I
said, nor did there seem aught else to say.

'Think, Joan
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 woman 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 she narrated a
fearful blasphemy of horrid brutes that inhabited a valley of
wondrous loveliness, brutes that pounced upon each Barsoomian as
she terminated her pilgrimage and devoured her upon the banks of
the Lost Sea where she 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 chest of the
River of Mystery.

'But now we know
that it was no blasphemy, that the legend is a true one, and that
the woman told only of what she saw; but what does it profit us,
Joan 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 women
say, we are between the devil and the deep sea, Tara 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 woman, green Barsoomian or red woman,
whosoever it shall be that takes the last toll from us will know
that it is costly in lives to wipe out Joan Carter, Princess of the
House of Tardoa Mors, and Tara Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark, at the same
time.'

I could not help
but laugh at her grim humour, and she 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 her from the others of
her kind.

'But about
yourself, Joan Carter,' she 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 Dejar 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 prince again in
this life--and you have seen to-day with what pitiful futility
woman yearns toward a material hereafter.

'Only a bare
half-hour before I saw you battling with the plant women 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 Tara 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 her eyes see those uncanny things which are hidden from
the sight of woman.

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, God of Death, of his
just dues? Did not his mighty messenger, the ancient Iss, bear you
upon his leaden chest at your own behest to the Valley
Dor?

'Thinkest thou, O
fools, that Issus wilt give up his 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.