A Princess of Mars

At daybreak of the fifteenth day of my search I was overjoyed to see

the high trees that denoted the object of my search. About noon I

dragged myself wearily to the portals of a huge building which covered

perhaps four square miles and towered two hundred feet in the air. It

showed no aperture in the mighty walls other than the tiny door at

which I sank exhausted, nor was there any sign of life about it.

I could find no bell or other method of making my presence known to the

inmates of the place, unless a small round role in the wall near the

door was for that purpose. It was of about the bigness of a lead

pencil and thinking that it might be in the nature of a speaking tube I

put my mouth to it and was about to call into it when a voice issued

from it asking me whom I might be, where from, and the nature of my

errand.

I explained that I had escaped from the Warhoons and was dying of

starvation and exhaustion.

"You wear the metal of a green warrior and are followed by a calot, yet

you are of the figure of a red man. In color you are neither green nor

red. In the name of the ninth day, what manner of creature are you?"

"I am a friend of the red men of Barsoom and I am starving. In the

name of humanity open to us," I replied.

Presently the door commenced to recede before me until it had sunk into

the wall fifty feet, then it stopped and slid easily to the left,

exposing a short, narrow corridor of concrete, at the further end of

which was another door, similar in every respect to the one I had just

passed. No one was in sight, yet immediately we passed the first door

it slid gently into place behind us and receded rapidly to its original

position in the front wall of the building. As the door had slipped

aside I had noted its great thickness, fully twenty feet, and as it

reached its place once more after closing behind us, great cylinders of

steel had dropped from the ceiling behind it and fitted their lower

ends into apertures countersunk in the floor.

A second and third door receded before me and slipped to one side as

the first, before I reached a large inner chamber where I found food

and drink set out upon a great stone table. A voice directed me to

satisfy my hunger and to feed my calot, and while I was thus engaged my

invisible host put me through a severe and searching cross-examination.

"Your statements are most remarkable," said the voice, on concluding

its questioning, "but you are evidently speaking the truth, and it is

equally evident that you are not of Barsoom. I can tell that by the

conformation of your brain and the strange location of your internal

organs and the shape and size of your heart."