A Princess of Mars
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
To My Son Jack
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
CHAPTER I On the Arizona Hills
CHAPTER II The Escape of the Dead
CHAPTER III My Advent on Mars
CHAPTER IV A Prisoner
CHAPTER V I Elude My Watch Dog
CHAPTER VI A Fight That Won Friends
CHAPTER VII Child-Raising on Mars
CHAPTER VIII A Fair Captive from the Sky
CHAPTER IX I Learn the Language
CHAPTER X Champion and Chief
CHAPTER XI With Dejah Thoris
CHAPTER XII A Prisoner with Power
CHAPTER XIII Love-Making on Mars
CHAPTER XIV A Duel to the Death
CHAPTER XV Sola Tells Me Her Story
CHAPTER XVI We Plan Escape
CHAPTER XVII A Costly Recapture
CHAPTER XVIII Chained in Warhoon
CHAPTER XIX Battling in the Arena
CHAPTER XX In the Atmosphere Factory
CHAPTER XXI An Air Scout for Zodanga
CHAPTER XXII I Find Dejah
CHAPTER XXIII Lost in the Sky
CHAPTER XXIV Tars Tarkas Finds a Friend
CHAPTER XXV The Looting of Zodanga
CHAPTER XXVI Through Carnage to Joy
CHAPTER XXVII From Joy to Death
CHAPTER XXVIII At the Arizona Cave
ILLUSTRATIONS
I sought out Dejah Thoris in the throng of departing chariots.
She drew upon the marble floor the first map of the Barsoomian territory I had ever seen.
The old man sat and talked with me for hours.
With my back against a golden throne, I fought once again for Dejah Thoris.
FOREWORD
To the Reader of this Work:
In submitting Captain Carter’s strange manuscript to you in book form,
I believe that a few words relative to this remarkable personality will
be of interest.
My first recollection of Captain Carter is of the few months he spent
at my father’s home in Virginia, just prior to the opening of the civil
war. I was then a child of but five years, yet I well remember the
tall, dark, smooth-faced, athletic man whom I called Uncle Jack.
He seemed always to be laughing; and he entered into the sports of the
children with the same hearty good fellowship he displayed toward those
pastimes in which the men and women of his own age indulged; or he
would sit for an hour at a time entertaining my old grandmother with
stories of his strange, wild life in all parts of the world. We all
loved him, and our slaves fairly worshipped the ground he trod.
He was a splendid specimen of manhood, standing a good two inches over
six feet, broad of shoulder and narrow of hip, with the carriage of the
trained fighting man. His features were regular and clear cut, his hair
black and closely cropped, while his eyes were of a steel gray,
reflecting a strong and loyal character, filled with fire and
initiative. His manners were perfect, and his courtliness was that of a
typical southern gentleman of the highest type.
His horsemanship, especially after hounds, was a marvel and delight
even in that country of magnificent horsemen. I have often heard my
father caution him against his wild recklessness, but he would only
laugh, and say that the tumble that killed him would be from the back
of a horse yet unfoaled.
When the war broke out he left us, nor did I see him again for some
fifteen or sixteen years. When he returned it was without warning, and
I was much surprised to note that he had not aged apparently a moment,
nor had he changed in any other outward way. He was, when others were
with him, the same genial, happy fellow we had known of old, but when
he thought himself alone I have seen him sit for hours gazing off into
space, his face set in a look of wistful longing and hopeless misery;
and at night he would sit thus looking up into the heavens, at what I
did not know until I read his manuscript years afterward.
He told us that he had been prospecting and mining in Arizona part of
the time since the war; and that he had been very successful was
evidenced by the unlimited amount of money with which he was supplied.
As to the details of his life during these years he was very reticent,
in fact he would not talk of them at all.
He remained with us for about a year and then went to New York, where
he purchased a little place on the Hudson, where I visited him once a
year on the occasions of my trips to the New York market—my father and
I owning and operating a string of general stores throughout Virginia
at that time. Captain Carter had a small but beautiful cottage,
situated on a bluff overlooking the river, and during one of my last
visits, in the winter of 1885, I observed he was much occupied in
writing, I presume now, upon this manuscript.
He told me at this time that if anything should happen to him he wished
me to take charge of his estate, and he gave me a key to a compartment
in the safe which stood in his study, telling me I would find his will
there and some personal instructions which he had me pledge myself to
carry out with absolute fidelity.
After I had retired for the night I have seen him from my window
standing in the moonlight on the brink of the bluff overlooking the
Hudson with his arms stretched out to the heavens as though in appeal.
I thought at the time that he was praying, although I never understood
that he was in the strict sense of the term a religious man.
Several months after I had returned home from my last visit, the first
of March, 1886, I think, I received a telegram from him asking me to
come to him at once. I had always been his favorite among the younger
generation of Carters and so I hastened to comply with his demand.
I arrived at the little station, about a mile from his grounds, on the
morning of March 4, 1886, and when I asked the livery man to drive me
out to Captain Carter’s he replied that if I was a friend of the
Captain’s he had some very bad news for me; the Captain had been found
dead shortly after daylight that very morning by the watchman attached
to an adjoining property.
For some reason this news did not surprise me, but I hurried out to his
place as quickly as possible, so that I could take charge of the body
and of his affairs.
I found the watchman who had discovered him, together with the local
police chief and several townspeople, assembled in his little study.
The watchman related the few details connected with the finding of the
body, which he said had been still warm when he came upon it. It lay,
he said, stretched full length in the snow with the arms outstretched
above the head toward the edge of the bluff, and when he showed me the
spot it flashed upon me that it was the identical one where I had seen
him on those other nights, with his arms raised in supplication to the
skies.
There were no marks of violence on the body, and with the aid of a
local physician the coroner’s jury quickly reached a decision of death
from heart failure. Left alone in the study, I opened the safe and
withdrew the contents of the drawer in which he had told me I would
find my instructions. They were in part peculiar indeed, but I have
followed them to each last detail as faithfully as I was able.
He directed that I remove his body to Virginia without embalming, and
that he be laid in an open coffin within a tomb which he previously had
had constructed and which, as I later learned, was well ventilated. The
instructions impressed upon me that I must personally see that this was
carried out just as he directed, even in secrecy if necessary.
His property was left in such a way that I was to receive the entire
income for twenty-five years, when the principal was to become mine.
His further instructions related to this manuscript which I was to
retain sealed and unread, just as I found it, for eleven years; nor was
I to divulge its contents until twenty-one years after his death.
A strange feature about the tomb, where his body still lies, is that
the massive door is equipped with a single, huge gold-plated spring
lock which can be opened _only from the inside_.
Yours very sincerely,
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
CHAPTER I
ON THE ARIZONA HILLS
I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred,
possibly more; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other
men, nor do I remember any childhood. So far as I can recollect I have
always been a man, a man of about thirty. I appear today as I did forty
years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever;
that some day I shall die the real death from which there is no
resurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died
twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you
who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I
believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality.
And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the
story of the interesting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot
explain the phenomena; I can only set down here in the words of an
ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strange events that
befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in an
Arizona cave.
I have never told this story, nor shall mortal man see this manuscript
until after I have passed over for eternity. I know that the average
human mind will not believe what it cannot grasp, and so I do not
purpose being pilloried by the public, the pulpit, and the press, and
held up as a colossal liar when I am but telling the simple truths
which some day science will substantiate. Possibly the suggestions
which I gained upon Mars, and the knowledge which I can set down in
this chronicle, will aid in an earlier understanding of the mysteries
of our sister planet; mysteries to you, but no longer mysteries to me.
My name is John Carter; I am better known as Captain Jack Carter of
Virginia. At the close of the Civil War I found myself possessed of
several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain’s
commission in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed; the
servant of a state which had vanished with the hopes of the South.
Masterless, penniless, and with my only means of livelihood, fighting,
gone, I determined to work my way to the southwest and attempt to
retrieve my fallen fortunes in a search for gold.
I spent nearly a year prospecting in company with another Confederate
officer, Captain James K. Powell of Richmond. We were extremely
fortunate, for late in the winter of 1865, after many hardships and
privations, we located the most remarkable gold-bearing quartz vein
that our wildest dreams had ever pictured. Powell, who was a mining
engineer by education, stated that we had uncovered over a million
dollars worth of ore in a trifle over three months.
As our equipment was crude in the extreme we decided that one of us
must return to civilization, purchase the necessary machinery and
return with a sufficient force of men properly to work the mine.
As Powell was familiar with the country, as well as with the mechanical
requirements of mining we determined that it would be best for him to
make the trip. It was agreed that I was to hold down our claim against
the remote possibility of its being jumped by some wandering
prospector.
On March 3, 1866, Powell and I packed his provisions on two of our
burros, and bidding me good-bye he mounted his horse, and started down
the mountainside toward the valley, across which led the first stage of
his journey.
The morning of Powell’s departure was, like nearly all Arizona
mornings, clear and beautiful; I could see him and his little pack
animals picking their way down the mountainside toward the valley, and
all during the morning I would catch occasional glimpses of them as
they topped a hog back or came out upon a level plateau. My last sight
of Powell was about three in the afternoon as he entered the shadows of
the range on the opposite side of the valley.