Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs

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 Idid forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannot go on living forever; that some dayI shall die the real death from which there is no resurrection. I do not know why I shouldfear death, I who have died twice and am still alive; but yet I have the same horror of it asyou who have never died, and it is because of this terror of death, I believe, that I am soconvinced of my mortality. And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the story of theinteresting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot explain the phenomena; I can onlyset down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle of the strangeevents that befell me during the ten years that my dead body lay undiscovered in anArizona cave. I have never told this story, nor shall mortal man see this manuscript until after I havepassed over for eternity. I know that the average human mind will not believe what itcannot grasp, and so I do not purpose being pilloried by the public, the pulpit, and thepress, and held up as a colossal liar when I am but telling the simple truths which some dayscience will substantiate. Possibly the suggestions which I gained upon Mars, and theknowledge which I can set down in this chronicle, will aid in an earlier understanding ofthe mysteries of our sister planet; mysteries to you, but no longer mysteries to me.