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Page 18
The girl felt renewed hope, for she could not believe that in the
heart of Carthoris could lie intent to harm her.
She spoke to the warrior squatting before the control board.
"Last night you wore the trappings of a Dusarian," she said. "Now
your metal is that of Helium. What means it?"
The man looked at her with a grin.
"The Prince of Helium is no fool," he said.
Just then an officer emerged from the tiny cabin. He reprimanded
the warrior for conversing with the prisoner, nor would he himself
reply to any of her inquiries.
No harm was offered her during the journey, and so they came at last
to their destination with the girl no wiser as to her abductors or
their purpose than at first.
Here the flier settled slowly into the plaza of one of those mute
monuments of Mars' dead and forgotten past--the deserted cities
that fringe the sad ochre sea-bottoms where once rolled the mighty
floods upon whose bosoms moved the maritime commerce of the peoples
that are gone for ever.
Thuvia of Ptarth was no stranger to such places. During her
wanderings in search of the River Iss, that time she had set out
upon what, for countless ages, had been the last, long pilgrimage
of Martians, toward the Valley Dor, where lies the Lost Sea of
Korus, she had encountered several of these sad reminders of the
greatness and the glory of ancient Barsoom.
And again, during her flight from the temples of the Holy Therns
with Tars Tarkas, Jeddak of Thark, she had seen them, with their
weird and ghostly inmates, the great white apes of Barsoom.
She knew, too, that many of them were used now by the nomadic tribes
of green men, but that among them all was no city that the red
men did not shun, for without exception they stood amidst vast,
waterless tracts, unsuited for the continued sustenance of the
dominant race of Martians.
Why, then, should they be bringing her to such a place? There was
but a single answer. Such was the nature of their work that they
must needs seek the seclusion that a dead city afforded. The girl
trembled at thought of her plight.
For two days her captors kept her within a huge palace that even in
decay reflected the splendour of the age which its youth had known.
Just before dawn on the third day she had been aroused by the voices
of two of her abductors.
"He should be here by dawn," one was saying. "Have her in readiness
upon the plaza--else he will never land. The moment he finds that
he is in a strange country he will turn about--methinks the prince's
plan is weak in this one spot."
"There was no other way," replied the other. "It is wondrous work
to get them both here at all, and even if we do not succeed in
luring him to the ground, we shall have accomplished much."
Just then the speaker caught the eyes of Thuvia upon him, revealed
by the quick-moving patch of light cast by Thuria in her mad race
through the heavens.
With a quick sign to the other, he ceased speaking, and advancing
toward the girl, motioned her to rise. Then he led her out into
the night toward the centre of the great plaza.
"Stand here," he commanded, "until we come for you. We shall
be watching, and should you attempt to escape it will go ill with
you--much worse than death. Such are the prince's orders."
Then he turned and retraced his steps toward the palace, leaving
her alone in the midst of the unseen terrors of the haunted city,
for in truth these places are haunted in the belief of many Martians
who still cling to an ancient superstition which teaches that the
spirits of Holy Therns who die before their allotted one thousand
years, pass, on occasions, into the bodies of the great white apes.
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