The Chessmen of Mars quotes

Lord! but it is good to see you—and not a day older in appearance than when you trotted me on your knee in my babyhood. How do you explain it, John Carter, Warlord of Mars, or do you try to explain it?”

“Why attempt to explain the inexplicable?”

he replied. “As I have told you before, I am a very old man. I do not know how old I am. I recall no childhood;

Gahan smiled.

“We do not speak of that except to enemies,” he said, “and then with tongues of steel rather than of flesh.”

“But what practice in the art of war has a people which nature has thus protected from attack?”

At the stamping of the little foot, a great beast rose from the corner of the room and crossed to Tara of Helium where it stood looking up into her face. She placed her hand upon the ugly head.

“Dear old Woola,” she said; “no love could be deeper than yours, yet it never offends. Would that men might pattern themselves after you!”

Tears came to the soft eyes of the slave girl. “It is because I love you, my princess,” she said softly. Tara of Helium melted. She took the slave in her arms and kissed her.

“I have the disposition of a thoat, Uthia,” she said.

“Forgive me! I love you and there is nothing that I would not do for you and nothing would I do to harm you. Again, as I have so often in the past, I offer you your freedom.”

Uthia shook her head sorrowfully. “Alas! she does,” she admitted.

“Iron is the Warlord of Barsoom to the influences of all but two. In the hands of Dejah Thoris and Tara of Helium he is as potters’ clay.”

“Then run and fetch my flying leather like the sweet slave you are,” directed the mistress.

She crept into his lap and kissed him. “You do not love me any more,” she announced. “No one loves me,” but she could not compose her features into a pout because bubbling laughter insisted upon breaking through.

“The trouble is there are too many who love you,” he said. “And now there is another.”

“Indeed!” she cried. “What do you mean?”

but it was a cold, damp, lonely world and she found it depressing after the novelty of it had been dissipated, by an overpowering sense of the magnitude of the forces surging about her.

Suddenly she felt very lonely and very cold and very little.

Hurriedly, therefore, she rose until presently her craft broke through into the glorious sunlight that transformed the upper surface of the somber element into rolling masses of burnished silver.

“Just that!” he exclaimed. “Could aught be more wonderful?”

“Yes,” replied the girl, “I can think of a number of things that would be infinitely more wonderful.”

“What do you mean?” asked the kaldane.

“I mean just what I say,” she replied. “I still live and while I live I may still find a way. Dead, there is no hope.”

“Find a way to what?” he asked.

It needs no body to function perfectly and properly as a brain. You would pit your feeble intellect against mine! Even now you are planning to slay me. If you are thwarted in that you expect to slay yourself.

You will learn the power of mind over matter. I am the mind. You are the matter.

What brain you have is too weak and ill-developed to deserve the name of brain. You have permitted it to be weakened by impulsive acts dictated by sentiment. It has no value. It has practically no control over your existence. You will not kill me.

“But I do not recognize you,” she said. “I have tried to recall you, but I have failed. Your name, what may it be?”

“It is not strange that so great a princess should not recall the face of every roving panthan of Barsoom,” he replied with a smile.

“But your name?” insisted the girl.

Development of the brain should not be the sum total of human endeavor. The richest and happiest peoples will be those who attain closest to well-balanced perfection of both mind and body, and even these must always be short of perfection.

In absolute and general perfection lies stifling monotony and death. Nature must have contrasts; she must have shadows as well as highlights; sorrow with happiness; both wrong and right; and sin as well as virtue.

”

… without air the things upon which you depend for existence cannot, and there had been no air in sufficient quantities upon Barsoom these many ages had not a red man planned and built the great atmosphere plant which gave new life to a dying world.

“What have all the brains of all the kaldanes that have ever lived done to compare with that single idea of a single red man?”

Ghek was stumped. Being a kaldane he knew that brains spelled the sum total of universal achievement, but it had never occurred to him that they should be put to use in practical and profitable ways.

“What have all the brains of all the kaldanes that have ever lived done to compare with that single idea of a single red man?”

Ghek was stumped. Being a kaldane he knew that brains spelled the sum total of universal achievement, but it had never occurred to him that they should be put to use in practical and profitable ways.

He turned away and looked down upon the valley of his ancestors across which he was slowly drifting, into what unknown world? He should be a veritable god among the underlings, he knew; but somehow a doubt assailed him.

Turan almost cursed him as he saw the form of Tara of Helium slowly wasting away before his eyes, while the hideous kaldane seemed as full of vitality as ever.

“There are circumstances,” remarked Ghek, “under which a gross and material body is less desirable than a highly developed brain.”

Turan looked at him, but said nothing. Tara of Helium smiled faintly. “One cannot blame him,” she said, “were we not a bit boastful in the pride of our superiority? When our stomachs were filled,” she added.

“Perhaps there is something to be said for their system,” Turan admitted. “If we could but lay aside our stomachs when they cried for food and water I have no doubt but that we should do so.”

“I should never miss mine now,” assented Tara; “it is mighty poor company.”

A new day had dawned, revealing a less desolate country and renewing again the hope that had been low within them. Suddenly Turan leaned forward, pointing ahead.

She laughed. “But he says he likes peace.”

“We all like peace,” he rejoined; “peace with honor; but our neighbors will not let us have it, and so we must fight.”

“And to fight well men must like to fight,” she added.

“And to fight well men must like to fight,” she added.

“And to like to fight they must know how to fight,” he said, “for no man likes to do the thing that he does not know how to do well.”

“Or that some other man can do better than he.”

“But I am a princess,” cried the girl haughtily, “and my country is not at war with yours. You must give me and my companions aid and assist us to return to our own land. It is the law of Barsoom.”

“Manator knows only the laws of Manator,” replied U-Dor

; “but come. You shall go with us to the city, where you, being beautiful, need have no fear. I, myself, will protect you if O-Tar so decrees. And as for your companion—but hold! You said ‘companions’—there are others of your party then?”

Ah, if we had but the power to recall them! Before us would unfold the forgotten story of the lost eons that have preceded us.

We might even walk with God in the garden of His stars while man was still but a budding idea within His mind.

Ghek descended into the burrow at a steep incline for some ten feet, when he found himself in an elaborate and delightful network of burrows! The kaldane was elated. This indeed was life!

“And you sat there where you sit now?” continued the officer.

“Look thou to my chain and tell me then where else might I sit!” cried Ghek. “Art the people of thy city all fools?”

Three other warriors pressed behind the two in front, craning their necks to view the prisoner while they grinned at the discomfiture of their fellow. The officer scowled at Ghek.

Look! it has not been opened—but where is the key? It should be upon the table at the end opposite him. Where is the key, creature?” he shouted at Ghek.

“How should I, a prisoner, know better than my jailer the whereabouts of the key to my fetters?”

he retorted.

Lan-O, wide-eyed, looked with horror upon the corpse. “For this we shall both die,” she cried.

“And who would live a slave in Manator?” asked Tara of Helium.

“I am not so brave as thou,” said the slave girl, “and life is sweet and there is always hope.”

Into the eyes of the slave girl, Lan-O, who was watching her, there crept a soft light of understanding; but the officer ignored Tara’s question—what was the fate of another slave to him?

“Men do not disappear into thin air,” he growled

, “and if E-Med be not found soon O-Tar himself may take a hand in this.

A-Kor looked at him closely.

“Your own mother would never know you!” he said

; “but tell me, what has transpired since they took you away?”

“Stop!” she commanded. “You have no right to assume aught else than my lips testify.”

“The eyes are ofttimes more eloquent than the lips, Tara,” he replied

; “and in yours I have read that which is neither hatred nor contempt for Turan the panthan, and my heart tells me that your lips bore false witness when they cried in anger: ‘I hate you!’ ”

“and in yours I have read that which is neither hatred nor contempt for Turan the panthan, and my heart tells me that your lips bore false witness when they cried in anger: ‘I hate you!’ ”

“I do not hate you, Turan, nor yet may I love you,” said the girl, simply.

“When I broke my way out from the chamber of I-Gos I was indeed upon the verge of believing that you did hate me,” he said, “for only hatred, it seemed to me, could account for the fact that you had gone without making an …

“I knew,” was Gahan’s only comment, but his heart was glad with elation, as a lover’s must be who has heard from the lips of his divinity an avowal of interest and loyalty, however little tinged by a suggestion of warmer regard it may be.

To be abused, even, by the mistress of one’s heart is better than to be ignored.

As the two conversed in the ill-lit chamber, the dim bulbs of which were encrusted with the accumulated dust of centuries, a bent and withered figure traversed slowly the gloomy corridors without, his weak and watery eyes peering through thick lenses at the signs of …

Slowly a chief arose and two others followed his example, though with ill-concealed reluctance. “All, then, are not cowards,” commented O-Tar. “The duty is distasteful. Therefore all three of you shall go, taking as many warriors as you wish.”

“But do not ask for volunteers,” interrupted I-Gos, “or you will go alone.”

The three chiefs turned and left the banquet hall, walking slowly like doomed men to their fate.

afraid not to. But at last his fear of his own warriors, watching behind him, grew greater than the fear of the unknown behind the ancient door and he pushed the heavy skeel aside and entered.

Silence and gloom and the dust of centuries lay heavy upon the chamber.

From his warriors he knew the route that he must take to the horrid chamber of O-Mai and so he forced his unwilling feet across the room before him, across the room where the jetan players sat at their eternal game, and came to the …

They would degrade him and they would slay him into the bargain. There was no doubt of what his fate would be should he flee the apartments of O-Mai in terror.

His only hope, therefore, lay in daring the unknown in preference to the known.

He moved forward. A few steps took him to the doorway. The chamber before him was darker than the corridor, so that he could just indistinctly make out the objects in the room.

“Then I did not fully realize the cowardice of my jeddak, or the bravery of you and the girl.

I am an old man from another age and I love courage.

At first I resented the girl’s attack upon me, but later I came to see the bravery of it and it won my admiration, as have all her acts. She feared not O-Tar, she feared not me, she feared not all the warriors of Manator.

“I cannot get word to her,” said I-Gos. “The quarters of his women O-Tar guards with jealous hand. Here are his most trusted slaves and warriors, yet even so, thick among them are countless spies, so that no man knows which be which.

No shadow falls within those chambers that is not marked by a hundred eyes.

”