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Page 46
For a moment the vessel hovered motionless directly above the centre
of the gaping void, then slowly she began to settle into the black
chasm. Lower and lower she sank until as darkness enveloped us
her lights were thrown on and in the dim halo of her own radiance
the monster battleship dropped on and on down into what seemed to
me must be the very bowels of Barsoom.
For quite half an hour we descended and then the shaft terminated
abruptly in the dome of a mighty subterranean world. Below us rose
and fell the billows of a buried sea. A phosphorescent radiance
illuminated the scene. Thousands of ships dotted the bosom of the
ocean. Little islands rose here and there to support the strange
and colourless vegetation of this strange world.
Slowly and with majestic grace the battleship dropped until
she rested on the water. Her great propellers had been drawn and
housed during our descent of the shaft and in their place had been
run out the smaller but more powerful water propellers. As these
commenced to revolve the ship took up its journey once more, riding
the new element as buoyantly and as safely as she had the air.
Phaidor and I were dumbfounded. Neither had either heard or dreamed
that such a world existed beneath the surface of Barsoom.
Nearly all the vessels we saw were war craft. There were a few
lighters and barges, but none of the great merchantmen such as ply
the upper air between the cities of the outer world.
"Here is the harbour of the navy of the First Born," said a voice
behind us, and turning we saw Xodar watching us with an amused
smile on his lips.
"This sea," he continued, "is larger than Korus. It receives the
waters of the lesser sea above it. To keep it from filling above
a certain level we have four great pumping stations that force the
oversupply back into the reservoirs far north from which the red
men draw the water which irrigates their farm lands."
A new light burst on me with this explanation. The red men had
always considered it a miracle that caused great columns of water
to spurt from the solid rock of their reservoir sides to increase
the supply of the precious liquid which is so scarce in the outer
world of Mars.
Never had their learned men been able to fathom the secret of the
source of this enormous volume of water. As ages passed they had
simply come to accept it as a matter of course and ceased to question
its origin.
We passed several islands on which were strangely shaped circular
buildings, apparently roofless, and pierced midway between the ground
and their tops with small, heavily barred windows. They bore the
earmarks of prisons, which were further accentuated by the armed
guards who squatted on low benches without, or patrolled the short
beach lines.
Few of these islets contained over an acre of ground, but presently
we sighted a much larger one directly ahead. This proved to be
our destination, and the great ship was soon made fast against the
steep shore.
Xodar signalled us to follow him and with a half-dozen officers and
men we left the battleship and approached a large oval structure
a couple of hundred yards from the shore.
"You shall soon see Issus," said Xodar to Phaidor. "The few
prisoners we take are presented to her. Occasionally she selects
slaves from among them to replenish the ranks of her handmaidens.
None serves Issus above a single year," and there was a grim smile
on the black's lips that lent a cruel and sinister meaning to his
simple statement.
Phaidor, though loath to believe that Issus was allied to such as
these, had commenced to entertain doubts and fears. She clung very
closely to me, no longer the proud daughter of the Master of Life
and Death upon Barsoom, but a young and frightened girl in the
power of relentless enemies.
The building which we now entered was entirely roofless. In its
centre was a long tank of water, set below the level of the floor
like the swimming pool of a natatorium. Near one side of the pool
floated an odd-looking black object. Whether it were some strange
monster of these buried waters, or a queer raft, I could not at
once perceive.
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