words I most dreaded, but yet I loved her so that I could not refrain
from hearing even the worst about her fate so that it fell from the
lips of one who had seen her but recently. It was to me as though it
brought her closer to me.

"Yesterday the monthly rites of Issus were held," replied Yersted, "and
I saw her then sitting in her accustomed place at the foot of Issus."

"What," I cried, "she is not dead, then?"

"Why, no," replied the black, "it has been no year since she gazed upon
the divine glory of the radiant face of--"

"No year?" I interrupted.

"Why, no," insisted Yersted. "It cannot have been upward of three
hundred and seventy or eighty days."

A great light burst upon me. How stupid I had been! I could scarcely
retain an outward exhibition of my great joy. Why had I forgotten the
great difference in the length of Martian and Earthly years! The ten
Earth years I had spent upon Barsoom had encompassed but five years and
ninety-six days of Martian time, whose days are forty-one minutes
longer than ours, and whose years number six hundred and eighty-seven
days.

I am in time! I am in time! The words surged through my brain again
and again, until at last I must have voiced them audibly, for Yersted
shook his head.

"In time to save your Princess?" he asked, and then without waiting for
my reply, "No, John Carter, Issus will not give up her own. She knows
that you are coming, and ere ever a vandal foot is set within the
precincts of the Temple of Issus, if such a calamity should befall,
Dejah Thoris will be put away for ever from the last faint hope of
rescue."

"You mean that she will be killed merely to thwart me?" I asked.

"Not that, other than as a last resort," he replied. "Hast ever heard
of the Temple of the Sun? It is there that they will put her. It lies
far within the inner court of the Temple of Issus, a little temple that
raises a thin spire far above the spires and minarets of the great
temple that surrounds it. Beneath it, in the ground, there lies the
main body of the temple consisting in six hundred and eighty-seven
circular chambers, one below another. To each chamber a single
corridor leads through solid rock from the pits of Issus.

"As the entire Temple of the Sun revolves once with each revolution of
Barsoom about the sun, but once each year does the entrance to each
separate chamber come opposite the mouth of the corridor which forms
its only link to the world