igh Priestess of the Flaming God, and fifty of her
horrid priests searching for the purloiner of the sacred sacrificial
knife.

Never before had La passed beyond the crumbling outer walls of Opar;
but never before had need been so insistent. The sacred knife was
gone! Handed down through countless ages it had come to her as a
heritage and an insignia of her religious office and regal authority
from some long-dead progenitor of lost and forgotten Atlantis. The
loss of the crown jewels or the Great Seal of England could have
brought no greater consternation to a British king than did the
pilfering of the sacred knife bring to La, the Oparian, Queen and High
Priestess of the degraded remnants of the oldest civilization upon
earth. When Atlantis, with all her mighty cities and her cultivated
fields and her great commerce and culture and riches sank into the sea
long ages since, she took with her all but a handful of her colonists
working the vast gold mines of Central Africa. From these and their
degraded slaves and a later intermixture of the blood of the
anthropoids sprung the gnarled men of Opar; but by some queer freak of
fate, aided by natural selection, the old Atlantean strain had remained
pure and undegraded in the females descended from a single princess of
the royal house of Atlantis who had been in Opar at the time of the
great catastrophe. Such was La.

Burning with white-hot anger was the High Priestess, her heart a
seething, molten mass of hatred for Tarzan of the Apes. The zeal of
the religious fanatic whose altar has been desecrated was triply
enhanced by the rage of a woman scorned. Twice had she thrown her
heart at the feet of the godlike ape-man and twice had she been
repulsed. La knew that she was beautiful--and she was beautiful, not
by the standards of prehistoric Atlantis alone, but by those of modern
times was La physically a creature of perfection. Before Tarzan came
that first time to Opar, La had never seen a human male other than the
grotesque and knotted men of her clan. With one of these she must mate
sooner or later that the direct line of high priestesses might not be
broken, unless Fate should bring other men to Opar. Before Tarzan came
upon his first visit, La had had no thought that such men as he
existed, for she knew only her hideous little priests and the bulls of
the tribe of great anthropoids that had dwelt from time immemorial in
and about Opar, until they had come to b