"02 - Gods of Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burroughs Edgar Rice)

XIX. Black Despair
XX. The Air Battle
XXI. Through Flood and Flame
XXII. Victory and Defeat

THE GODS OF MARS CHAPTER I THE PLANT MEN As I stood upon the bluff before my
cottage on that clear cold night in the early part of March, 1886, the noble
Hudson flowing like the grey and silent spectre of a dead river below me, I felt
again the strange, compelling influence of the mighty god of war, my beloved
Mars, which for ten long and lonesome years I had implored with outstretched
arms to carry me back to my lost love. 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. Nor did I
have long to wait; for scarce had I turned ere I shot with the rapidity of
thought into the awful void before me. There was the same instant of unthinkable
cold and utter darkness that I had experienced twenty years before, and then I
opened my eyes in another world, beneath the burning rays of a hot sun, which
beat through a tiny opening in the dome of the mighty forest in which I lay. The
scene that met my eyes was so un-Martian that my heart sprang to my throat as
the sudden fear swept through me that I had been aimlessly tossed upon some
strange planet by a cruel fate. Why not? What guide had I through the trackless
waste of interplanetary space? What assurance that I might not as well be
hurtled to some far-distant star of another solar system, as to Mars? I lay upon
a close-cropped sward of red grasslike vegetation, and about me stretched a
grove of strange and beautiful trees, covered with huge and gorgeous blossoms
and filled with brilliant, voiceless birds. I call them birds since they were
winged, but mortal eye ne'er rested on such odd, unearthly shapes. The
vegetation was similar to that which covers the lawns of the red Martians of the
great waterways, but the trees and birds were unlike anything that I had ever
seen upon Mars, and then through the further trees I could see that most
un-Martian of all sights--an open sea, its blue waters shimmering beneath the
brazen sun. As I rose to investigate further I experienced the same ridiculous
catastrophe that had met my first attempt to walk under Martian conditions. The