Beneath it, in
the ground, there lies the main body of the temple consisting in
six hundred and eighty-seven circular chambers, one below another.
To each chamber a single corridor leads through solid rock from
the pits of Issus.
"As the entire Temple of the Sun revolves once with each revolution
of Barsoom about the sun, but once each year does the entrance to
each separate chamber come opposite the mouth of the corridor which
forms its only link to the world without.
"Here Issus puts those who displease her, but whom she does not
care to execute forthwith. Or to punish a noble of the First Born
she may cause him to be placed within a chamber of the Temple of
the Sun for a year. Ofttimes she imprisons an executioner with
the condemned, that death may come in a certain horrible form upon
a given day, or again but enough food is deposited in the chamber
to sustain life but the number of days that Issus has allotted for
mental anguish.
"Thus will Dejah Thoris die, and her fate will be sealed by the
first alien foot that crosses the threshold of Issus."
So I was to be thwarted in the end, although I had performed the
miraculous and come within a few short moments of my divine Princess,
yet was I as far from her as when I stood upon the banks of the
Hudson forty-eight million miles away.
CHAPTER XXI
THROUGH FLOOD AND FLAME
Yersted's information convinced me that there was no time to be
lost.
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