"For ten long Earth years I
have been praying and hoping for the day that would carry me once
more to this grim old planet of yours, for which, with all its
cruel and terrible customs, I feel a bond of sympathy and love even
greater than for the world that gave me birth.
"For ten years have I been enduring a living death of uncertainty
and doubt as to whether Dejah Thoris lived, and now that for the
first time in all these years my prayers have been answered and my
doubt relieved I find myself, through a cruel whim of fate, hurled
into the one tiny spot of all Barsoom from which there is apparently
no escape, and if there were, at a price which would put out for
ever the last flickering hope which I may cling to of seeing my
princess again in this life--and you have seen to-day with what
pitiful futility man yearns toward a material hereafter.
"Only a bare half-hour before I saw you battling with the plant
men I was standing in the moonlight upon the banks of a broad river
that taps the eastern shore of Earth's most blessed land. I have
answered you, my friend. Do you believe?"
"I believe," replied Tars Tarkas, "though I cannot understand."
As we talked I had been searching the interior of the chamber with
my eyes. It was, perhaps, two hundred feet in length and half as
broad, with what appeared to be a doorway in the centre of the wall
directly opposite that through which we had entered.
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