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