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Page 32
Scarcely waiting for their craft to touch, the creatures manning
them leaped among the therns with the fury of demons. Such fighting!
Never had I witnessed its like before. I had thought the green
Martians the most ferocious warriors in the universe, but the awful
abandon with which the black pirates threw themselves upon their
foes transcended everything I ever before had seen.
Beneath the brilliant light of Mars' two glorious moons the whole
scene presented itself in vivid distinctness. The golden-haired,
white-skinned therns battling with desperate courage in hand-to-hand
conflict with their ebony-skinned foemen.
Here a little knot of struggling warriors trampled a bed of gorgeous
pimalia; there the curved sword of a black man found the heart of
a thern and left its dead foeman at the foot of a wondrous statue
carved from a living ruby; yonder a dozen therns pressed a single
pirate back upon a bench of emerald, upon whose iridescent surface
a strangely beautiful Barsoomian design was traced out in inlaid
diamonds.
A little to one side stood Thuvia, the Thark, and I. The tide of
battle had not reached us, but the fighters from time to time swung
close enough that we might distinctly note them.
The black pirates interested me immensely. I had heard vague
rumours, little more than legends they were, during my former life
on Mars; but never had I seen them, nor talked with one who had.
They were popularly supposed to inhabit the lesser moon, from which
they descended upon Barsoom at long intervals. Where they visited
they wrought the most horrible atrocities, and when they left
carried away with them firearms and ammunition, and young girls
as prisoners. These latter, the rumour had it, they sacrificed
to some terrible god in an orgy which ended in the eating of their
victims.
I had an excellent opportunity to examine them, as the strife
occasionally brought now one and now another close to where I stood.
They were large men, possibly six feet and over in height. Their
features were clear cut and handsome in the extreme; their eyes were
well set and large, though a slight narrowness lent them a crafty
appearance; the iris, as well as I could determine by moonlight,
was of extreme blackness, while the eyeball itself was quite white
and clear. The physical structure of their bodies seemed identical
with those of the therns, the red men, and my own. Only in the
colour of their skin did they differ materially from us; that is
of the appearance of polished ebony, and odd as it may seem for
a Southerner to say it, adds to rather than detracts from their
marvellous beauty.
But if their bodies are divine, their hearts, apparently, are quite
the reverse. Never did I witness such a malign lust for blood as
these demons of the outer air evinced in their mad battle with the
therns.
All about us in the garden lay their sinister craft, which the
therns for some reason, then unaccountable to me, made no effort
to injure. Now and again a black warrior would rush from a near by
temple bearing a young woman in his arms. Straight for his flier
he would leap while those of his comrades who fought near by would
rush to cover his escape.
The therns on their side would hasten to rescue the girl, and in
an instant the two would be swallowed in the vortex of a maelstrom
of yelling devils, hacking and hewing at one another, like fiends
incarnate.
But always, it seemed, were the black pirates of Barsoom victorious,
and the girl, brought miraculously unharmed through the conflict,
borne away into the outer darkness upon the deck of a swift flier.
Fighting similar to that which surrounded us could be heard in
both directions as far as sound carried, and Thuvia told me that
the attacks of the black pirates were usually made simultaneously
along the entire ribbon-like domain of the therns, which circles
the Valley Dor on the outer slopes of the Mountains of Otz.
As the fighting receded from our position for a moment, Thuvia
turned toward me with a question.
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