you, will find it."

And with my words there crept above the threshold of my conscious mind
a series of nine long forgotten sounds. Like a flash of lightning in
the darkness their full purport dawned upon me--the key to the three
great doors of the atmosphere plant!

Turning suddenly toward Tardos Mors as I still clasped my dying love to
my breast I cried.

"A flier, Jeddak! Quick! Order your swiftest flier to the palace top.
I can save Barsoom yet."

He did not wait to question, but in an instant a guard was racing to
the nearest dock and though the air was thin and almost gone at the
rooftop they managed to launch the fastest one-man, air-scout machine
that the skill of Barsoom had ever produced.

Kissing Dejah Thoris a dozen times and commanding Woola, who would have
followed me, to remain and guard her, I bounded with my old agility and
strength to the high ramparts of the palace, and in another moment I
was headed toward the goal of the hopes of all Barsoom.

I had to fly low to get sufficient air to breathe, but I took a
straight course across an old sea bottom and so had to rise only a few
feet above the ground.

I traveled with awful velocity for my errand was a race against time
with death. The face of Dejah Thoris hung always before me. As I
turned for a last look as I left the palace garden I had seen her
stagger and sink upon the ground beside the little incubator. That she
had dropped into the last coma which would end in death, if the air
supply remained unreplenished, I well knew, and so, throwing caution to
the winds, I flung overboard everything but the engine and compass,
even to my ornaments, and lying on my belly along the deck with one
hand on the steering wheel and the other pushing the speed lever to its
last notch I split the thin air of dying Mars with the speed of a
meteor.

An hour before dark the great walls of the atmosphere plant loomed
suddenly before me, and with a sickening thud I plunged to the ground
before the small door which was withholding the spark of life from the
inhabitants of an entire planet.

Beside the door a great crew of men had been laboring to pierce the
wall, but they had scarcely scratched the flint-like surface, and now
most of them lay in the last sleep from which not even air would awaken
them.

Conditions seemed much worse here than at Helium, and it was with
difficulty that I breathed at all. There were a few men still
conscious, and to one o