tentions concerning me?"

"I intend taking you both back to Helium," I said. "No harm will come
to you. You will find the red men of Helium a kindly and magnanimous
race, but if they listen to me there will be no more voluntary
pilgrimages down the river Iss, and the impossible belief that they
have cherished for ages will be shattered into a thousand pieces."

"Are you of Helium?" he asked.

"I am a Prince of the House of Tardos Mors, Jeddak of Helium," I
replied, "but I am not of Barsoom. I am of another world."

Xodar looked at me intently for a few moments.

"I can well believe that you are not of Barsoom," he said at length.
"None of this world could have bested eight of the First Born
single-handed. But how is it that you wear the golden hair and the
jewelled circlet of a Holy Thern?" He emphasized the word holy with a
touch of irony.

"I had forgotten them," I said. "They are the spoils of conquest," and
with a sweep of my hand I removed the disguise from my head.

When the black's eyes fell on my close-cropped black hair they opened
in astonishment. Evidently he had looked for the bald pate of a thern.

"You are indeed of another world," he said, a touch of awe in his
voice. "With the skin of a thern, the black hair of a First Born and
the muscles of a dozen Dators it was no disgrace even for Xodar to
acknowledge your supremacy. A thing he could never do were you a
Barsoomian," he added.

"You are travelling several laps ahead of me, my friend," I
interrupted. "I glean that your name is Xodar, but whom, pray, are the
First Born, and what a Dator, and why, if you were conquered by a
Barsoomian, could you not acknowledge it?"

"The First Born of Barsoom," he explained, "are the race of black men
of which I am a Dator, or, as the lesser Barsoomians would say, Prince.
My race is the oldest on the planet. We trace our lineage, unbroken,
direct to the Tree of Life which flourished in the centre of the Valley
Dor twenty-three million years ago.

"For countless ages the fruit of this tree underwent the gradual
changes of evolution, passing by degrees from true plant life to a
combination of plant and animal. In the first stages the fruit of the
tree possessed only the power of independent muscular action, while the
stem remained attached to the parent plant; later a brain developed in
the fruit, so that hanging there by their long stems they thought and
moved as individuals.

"Then, with the d