he cord the skeletons swung to the motion with a
noise as of the rustling of dry leaves.

It was a most grotesque and horrid tableau and I hastened out into the
fresh air; glad to escape from so gruesome a place.

The sight that met my eyes as I stepped out upon a small ledge which
ran before the entrance of the cave filled me with consternation.

A new heaven and a new landscape met my gaze. The silvered mountains
in the distance, the almost stationary moon hanging in the sky, the
cacti-studded valley below me were not of Mars. I could scarcely
believe my eyes, but the truth slowly forced itself upon me--I was
looking upon Arizona from the same ledge from which ten years before I
had gazed with longing upon Mars.

Burying my head in my arms I turned, broken, and sorrowful, down the
trail from the cave.

Above me shone the red eye of Mars holding her awful secret,
forty-eight million miles away.

Did the Martian reach the pump room? Did the vitalizing air reach the
people of that distant planet in time to save them? Was my Dejah
Thoris alive, or did her beautiful body lie cold in death beside the
tiny golden incubator in the sunken garden of the inner courtyard of
the palace of Tardos Mors, the jeddak of Helium?

For ten years I have waited and prayed for an answer to my questions.
For ten years I have waited and prayed to be taken back to the world of
my lost love. I would rather lie dead beside her there than live on
Earth all those millions of terrible miles from her.

The old mine, which I found untouched, has made me fabulously wealthy;
but what care I for wealth!

As I sit here tonight in my little study overlooking the Hudson, just
twenty years have elapsed since I first opened my eyes upon Mars.

I can see her shining in the sky through the little window by my desk,
and tonight she seems calling to me again as she has not called before
since that long dead night, and I think I can see, across that awful
abyss of space, a beautiful black-haired woman standing in the garden
of a palace, and at her side is a little boy who puts his arm around
her as she points into the sky toward the planet Earth, while at their
feet is a huge and hideous creature with a heart of gold.

I believe that they are waiting there for me, and something tells me
that I shall soon know.

End of Project Gutenberg's A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A PRINC