A Princess of Mars

On such a little thing my life hung that I often marvel that I escaped

so easily. Had not the rifle of the leader of the party swung from its

fastenings beside his saddle in such a way as to strike against the

butt of his great metal-shod spear I should have snuffed out without

ever knowing that death was near me. But the little sound caused me to

turn, and there upon me, not ten feet from my breast, was the point of

that huge spear, a spear forty feet long, tipped with gleaming metal,

and held low at the side of a mounted replica of the little devils I

had been watching.

But how puny and harmless they now looked beside this huge and terrific

incarnation of hate, of vengeance and of death. The man himself, for

such I may call him, was fully fifteen feet in height and, on Earth,

would have weighed some four hundred pounds. He sat his mount as we

sit a horse, grasping the animal's barrel with his lower limbs, while

the hands of his two right arms held his immense spear low at the side

of his mount; his two left arms were outstretched laterally to help

preserve his balance, the thing he rode having neither bridle or reins

of any description for guidance.

And his mount! How can earthly words describe it! It towered ten feet

at the shoulder; had four legs on either side; a broad flat tail,

larger at the tip than at the root, and which it held straight out

behind while running; a gaping mouth which split its head from its

snout to its long, massive neck.

Like its master, it was entirely devoid of hair, but was of a dark

slate color and exceeding smooth and glossy. Its belly was white, and

its legs shaded from the slate of its shoulders and hips to a vivid

yellow at the feet. The feet themselves were heavily padded and

nailless, which fact had also contributed to the noiselessness of their

approach, and, in common with a multiplicity of legs, is a

characteristic feature of the fauna of Mars. The highest type of man

and one other animal, the only mammal existing on Mars, alone have

well-formed nails, and there are absolutely no hoofed animals in

existence there.

Behind this first charging demon trailed nineteen others, similar in

all respects, but, as I learned later, bearing individual

characteristics peculiar to themselves; precisely as no two of us are

identical although we are all cast in a similar mold. This picture, or

rather materialized nightmare, which I have described at length, made

but one terrible and swift impression on me as I turned to meet it.

Unarmed and naked as I was, the first law of nature manifested itself

in the only possible solution of my immediate problem, and that was to

get out of the vicinity of the point of the charging spear.

Consequently I gave a very earthly and at the same time superhuman leap

to reach the top of the Martian incubator, for such I had determined it

must be.