might have been too late to save her--she was very low when I
left her in the royal gardens of Tardos Mors that long-gone night; so
very low that I scarcely hoped even then to reach the atmosphere plant
ere her dear spirit had fled from me for ever. And she lives yet?"

"She lives, John Carter."

"You have not told me where we are," I reminded him.

"We are where I expected to find you, John Carter--and another. Many
years ago you heard the story of the woman who taught me the thing that
green Martians are reared to hate, the woman who taught me to love.
You know the cruel tortures and the awful death her love won for her at
the hands of the beast, Tal Hajus.

"She, I thought, awaited me by the Lost Sea of Korus.

"You know that it was left for a man from another world, for yourself,
John Carter, to teach this cruel Thark what friendship is; and you, I
thought, also roamed the care-free Valley Dor.

"Thus were the two I most longed for at the end of the long pilgrimage
I must take some day, and so as the time had elapsed which Dejah Thoris
had hoped might bring you once more to her side, for she has always
tried to believe that you had but temporarily returned to your own
planet, I at last gave way to my great yearning and a month since I
started upon the journey, the end of which you have this day witnessed.
Do you understand now where you be, John Carter?"

"And that was the River Iss, emptying into the Lost Sea of Korus in the
Valley Dor?" I asked.

"This is the valley of love and peace and rest to which every
Barsoomian since time immemorial has longed to pilgrimage at the end of
a life of hate and strife and bloodshed," he replied. "This, John
Carter, is Heaven."

His tone was cold and ironical; its bitterness but reflecting the
terrible disappointment he had suffered. Such a fearful
disillusionment, such a blasting of life-long hopes and aspirations,
such an uprooting of age-old tradition might have excused a vastly
greater demonstration on the part of the Thark.

I laid my hand upon his shoulder.

"I am sorry," I said, nor did there seem aught else to say.

"Think, John Carter, of the countless billions of Barsoomians who have
taken the voluntary pilgrimage down this cruel river since the
beginning of time, only to fall into the ferocious clutches of the
terrible creatures that to-day assailed us.

"There is an ancient legend that once a red man returned from the banks
of the Lost Sea of Koru