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Page 3
CHAPTER I
THE PLANT MEN
As I stood upon the bluff before my cottage on that clear cold
night in the early part of March, 1886, the noble Hudson flowing
like the grey and silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt
again the strange, compelling influence of the mighty god of war,
my beloved Mars, which for ten long and lonesome years I had implored
with outstretched arms to carry me back to my lost love.
Not since that other March night in 1866, when I had stood without
that Arizona cave in which my still and lifeless body lay wrapped
in the similitude of earthly death had I felt the irresistible
attraction of the god of my profession.
With arms outstretched toward the red eye of the great star I stood
praying for a return of that strange power which twice had drawn
me through the immensity of space, praying as I had prayed on a
thousand nights before during the long ten years that I had waited
and hoped.
Suddenly a qualm of nausea swept over me, my senses 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.
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