Not since that other March night in 1866, when I had stood without
that Arizona cave in which my still and lifeless body lay wrapped
in the similitude of earthly death had I felt the irresistible
attraction of the god of my profession.

With arms outstretched toward the red eye of the great star I stood
praying for a return of that strange power which twice had drawn
me through the immensity of space, praying as I had prayed on a
thousand nights before during the long ten years that I had waited
and hoped.

Suddenly a qualm of nausea swept over me, my senses swam, my knees
gave beneath me and I pitched headlong to the ground upon the very
verge of the dizzy bluff.

Instantly my brain cleared and there swept back across the threshold
of my memory the vivid picture of the horrors of that ghostly
Arizona cave; again, as on that far-gone night, my muscles refused
to respond to my will and again, as though even here upon the banks
of the placid Hudson, I could hear the awful moans and rustling
of the fearsome thing which had lurked and threatened me from the
dark recesses of the cave, I made the same mighty and superhuman
effort to break the bonds of the strange anaesthesia which held me,
and again came the sharp click as of the sudden parting of a taut
wire, and I stood naked and free beside the staring, lifeless thing
that had so recently pulsed with the warm, red life-blood of John
Carter.

With scarcely a parting glance I turned my eyes again toward Mars,
lifted my hands toward his lurid rays, and waited.