come nearest to familiarizing me with the sensation
of fear.

I think that the cause of this feeling which these apes engender within
me is due to their remarkable resemblance in form to our Earth men,
which gives them a human appearance that is most uncanny when coupled
with their enormous size.

They stand fifteen feet in height and walk erect upon their hind feet.
Like the green Martians, they have an intermediary set of arms midway
between their upper and lower limbs. Their eyes are very close set,
but do not protrude as do those of the green men of Mars; their ears
are high set, but more laterally located than are the green men's,
while their snouts and teeth are much like those of our African
gorilla. Upon their heads grows an enormous shock of bristly hair.

It was into the eyes of such as these and the terrible plant men that I
gazed above the shoulder of my foe, and then, in a mighty wave of
snarling, snapping, screaming, purring rage, they swept over me--and of
all the sounds that assailed my ears as I went down beneath them, to me
the most hideous was the horrid purring of the plant men.

Instantly a score of cruel fangs and keen talons were sunk into my
flesh; cold, sucking lips fastened themselves upon my arteries. I
struggled to free myself, and even though weighed down by these immense
bodies, I succeeded in struggling to my feet, where, still grasping my
long-sword, and shortening my grip upon it until I could use it as a
dagger, I wrought such havoc among them that at one time I stood for an
instant free.

What it has taken minutes to write occurred in but a few seconds, but
during that time Tars Tarkas had seen my plight and had dropped from
the lower branches, which he had reached with such infinite labour, and
as I flung the last of my immediate antagonists from me the great Thark
leaped to my side, and again we fought, back to back, as we had done a
hundred times before.

Time and again the ferocious apes sprang in to close with us, and time
and again we beat them back with our swords. The great tails of the
plant men lashed with tremendous power about us as they charged from
various directions or sprang with the agility of greyhounds above our
heads; but every attack met a gleaming blade in sword hands that had
been reputed for twenty years the best that Mars ever had known; for
Tars Tarkas and John Carter were names that the fighting men of the
world of warriors loved best to speak.