Edgar Rice Burroughs - Mars Chronicles 08 - Swords of Mars.pdf

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On the Balcony
Jat Or
In the House of Gar Nal
"We Must Both Die!"
Pursued
On to Thuria
Thuria
Invisible Foes
The Cat-Man
Condemned to Death
Ozara
We Attempt Escape
In the Tower Of Diamonds
In the Dark Cell
The Secret Door
Back to Barsoom
before this self-same cabin, or that generations before that this
seemingly deserted canyon had been peopled by a race now extinct.
I had been seeking in their ruined cities for the secret of their
genesis and the even stranger secret of their extinction. How I
wished that those crumbling lava cliffs might speak and tell me of
all that they had witnessed since they poured out in a molten
stream from the cold and silent cones that dot the mesa land
beyond the canyon.
My thoughts returned again to Geronimo and his fierce Apache
warriors; and these vagrant musings engendered memories of
Captain John Carter of Virginia, whose dead body had lain for ten
long years in some forgotten cave in the mountains not far south of
this very spot – the cave in which he had sought shelter from
pursuing Apaches.
My eyes, following the pathway of my thoughts, searched the
heavens until they rested upon the red eye of Mars shining there in
the blue-black void; and so it was that Mars was uppermost in my
mind as I turned into my cabin and prepared for a good night's rest
beneath the rustling leaves of the cottonwoods, with whose soft and
soothing lullaby was mingled the rippling and the gurgling of the
waters of the little Colorado.
I was not sleepy; and so, after I had undressed, I arranged a
kerosene lamp near the head of my bunk and settled myself for the
enjoyment of a gangster story of assassination and kidnaping.
My cabin consists of two rooms. The smaller back room is my
bedroom. The larger room in front of it serves all other purposes,
being dining room, kitchen, and living room combined. From my
bunk, I cannot see directly into the front room. A flimsy partition
separates the bedroom from the living room. It consists of rough-
hewn boards that in the process of shrinking have left wide cracks
in the wall, and in addition to this the door between the two rooms
camped upon the headwaters of the Little Colorado; and certainly
no one who had the right to enter my cabin without knocking.
I sat up in my bunk and reached under my pillow for the .45 Colt
automatic that I keep there.
The oil lamp faintly illuminated my bedroom, but its main
strength was concentrated upon me. The outer room was in
darkness, as I could see by leaning from my bunk and peering
through the doorway.
"Who's there?" I demanded, releasing the safety catch on my
automatic and sliding my feet out of bed to the floor. Then, without
waiting for a reply, I blew out the lamp.
A low laugh came from the adjoining room. "It is a good thing
your wall is full of cracks," said a deep voice, "or otherwise I might
have stumbled into trouble. That is a mean-looking gun I saw
before you blew out your lamp."
The voice was familiar, but I could not definitely place it. "Who
are you?" I demanded.
"Light your lamp and I'll come in," replied my nocturnal visitor.
"If you're nervous, you can keep your gun on the doorway, but
please don't squeeze the trigger until you have had a chance to
recognize me."
"Damn!" I exclaimed under my breath, as I started to relight the
lamp."Chimney still hot?" inquired the deep voice from the outer
room.
"Plenty hot," I replied, as I succeeded at last in igniting the wick
and replacing the hot chimney. "Come in."
I remained seated on the edge of the bunk, but I kept the
doorway covered with my gun. I heard again the clanking of metal
upon metal, and then a man stepped into the light of my feeble
lamp and halted in the doorway. He was a tall man apparently
between twenty-five and thirty with grey eyes and black hair. He
was naked but for leather trappings that supported weapons of
bare feet. Hop back into bed again. These Arizona nights are none
too warm."
He drew up a chair and sat down. "What were you reading?" he
asked, as he picked up the magazine that had fallen to the floor and
glanced at the illustration. "It looks like a lurid tale."
"A pretty little bedtime story of assassination and kidnaping," I
explained.
"Haven't you enough of that on earth without reading about it for
entertainment?" he inquired. "We have on Mars."
"It is an expression of the normal morbid interest in the
horrifying," I said. "There is really no justification, but the fact
remains that I enjoy such tales. However, I have lost my interest
now. I want to hear about you and Dejah Thoris and Carthoris, and
what brought you here. It has been years since you have been back.
I had given up all hope of ever seeing you again."
He shook his head, a little sadly I thought. "It is a long story, a
story of love and loyalty, of hate and crime, a story of dripping
swords, of strange places and strange people upon a stranger world.
The living of it might have driven a weaker man to madness. To
have one you love taken from you and not to know her fate!"
I did not have to ask whom he meant. It could be none other
than the incomparable Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, and
consort of John Carter, Warlord of Mars – the woman for whose
deathless beauty a million swords had been kept red with blood on
the dying planet for many a long year.
For a long time John Carter sat in silence staring at the floor. I
knew that his thoughts were forty-three million miles away, and I
was loath to interrupt them. At last he spoke. "Human nature is
alike everywhere," he mid. He flicked the edge of the magazine lying
on my bunk. "We think that we want to forget the tragedies of life,
but we do not. If they momentarily pass us by and leave us in
peace, we must conjure them again, either in our thoughts or

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