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.
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