Never before had La passed beyond the crumbling outer walls of Opar;
but never before had need been so insistent. The sacred knife was
gone! Handed down through countless ages it had come to her as a
heritage and an insignia of her religious office and regal authority
from some long-dead progenitor of lost and forgotten Atlantis. The
loss of the crown jewels or the Great Seal of England could have
brought no greater consternation to a British king than did the
pilfering of the sacred knife bring to La, the Oparian, Queen and
High Priestess of the degraded remnants of the oldest civilization
upon earth. When Atlantis, with all her mighty cities and her
cultivated fields and her great commerce and culture and riches sank
into the sea long ages since, she took with her all but a handful
of her colonists working the vast gold mines of Central Africa.
From these and their degraded slaves and a later intermixture of
the blood of the anthropoids sprung the gnarled men of Opar; but
by some queer freak of fate, aided by natural selection, the old
Atlantean strain had remained pure and undegraded in the females
descended from a single princess of the royal house of Atlantis
who had been in Opar at the time of the great catastrophe. Such
was La.

Burning with white-hot anger was the High Priestess, her heart a
seething, molten mass of hatred for Tarzan of the Apes. The zeal
of the religious fanatic whose altar has been desecrated was triply
enhanced by the rage of a woman scorned. Twice had she thrown her
heart at the feet of the godlike ape-man and twice had she been
repulsed. La knew that she was beautiful--and she was beautiful,
not by the standards of prehistoric Atlantis alone, but by those
of modern times was La physically a creature of perfection. Before
Tarzan came that first time to Opar, La had never seen a human male