It
was not high and seemed to have a flat top.
Xodar had left us to attend to some duty on the vessel, and Phaidor
and I stood alone beside the rail. The girl had not once spoken
since we had been brought to the deck.
"Is what he has been telling me true?" I asked her.
"In part, yes," she answered. "That about the outer valley
is true, but what he says of the location of the Temple of Issus
in the centre of his country is false. If it is not false--" she
hesitated. "Oh it cannot be true, it cannot be true. For if it
were true then for countless ages have my people gone to torture
and ignominious death at the hands of their cruel enemies, instead
of to the beautiful Life Eternal that we have been taught to believe
Issus holds for us."
"As the lesser Barsoomians of the outer world have been lured by you
to the terrible Valley Dor, so may it be that the therns themselves
have been lured by the First Born to an equally horrid fate," I
suggested. "It would be a stern and awful retribution, Phaidor;
but a just one."
"I cannot believe it," she said.
"We shall see," I answered, and then we fell silent again for we were
rapidly approaching the black mountains, which in some indefinable
way seemed linked with the answer to our problem.
As we neared the dark, truncated cone the vessel's speed was
diminished until we barely moved. Then we topped the crest of the
mountain and below us I saw yawning the mouth of a huge circular
well, the bottom of which was lost in inky blackness.
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