Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Gods of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs

As I stood upon the bluff before my cottage on that clear cold night in the early part of March,1886, the noble Hudson flowing like the grey and silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt againthe strange, compelling influence of the mighty god of war, my beloved Mars, which for ten longand lonesome years I had implored with outstretched arms to carry me back to my lost love. Not since that other March night in 1866, when I had stood without that Arizona cave in whichmy still and lifeless body lay wrapped in the similitude of earthly death had I felt the irresistibleattraction of the god of my profession. With arms outstretched toward the red eye of the great star I stood praying for a return of thatstrange power which twice had drawn me through the immensity of space, praying as I had prayedon a thousand nights before during the long ten years that I had waited and hoped. Suddenly a qualm of nausea swept over me, my senses swam, my knees gave beneath me and Ipitched headlong to the ground upon the very verge of the dizzy bluff. Instantly my brain cleared and there swept back across the threshold of my memory the vividpicture of the horrors of that ghostly Arizona cave; again, as on that far-gone night, my musclesrefused to respond to my will and again, as though even here upon the banks of the placid Hudson, I could hear the awful moans and rustling of the fearsome thing which had lurked and threatenedme from the dark recesses of the cave, I made the same mighty and superhuman effort to break thebonds of the strange anaesthesia which held me, and again came the sharp click as of the suddenparting of a taut wire, and I stood naked and free beside the staring, lifeless thing that had sorecently pulsed with the warm, red life-blood of John Carter. With scarcely a parting glance I turned my eyes again toward Mars, lifted my hands toward hislurid rays, and waited. Nor did I have long to wait; for scarce had I turned ere I shot with the rapidity of thought intothe awful void before me. There was the same instant of unthinkable cold and utter darkness that Ihad experienced twenty years before, and then I opened my eyes in another world, beneath theburning rays of a hot sun, which beat through a tiny opening in the dome of the mighty forest inwhich I lay. The scene that met my eyes was so un-Martian that my heart sprang to my throat as the suddenfear swept through me that I had been aimlessly tossed upon some strange planet by a cruel fate