READ THE NOVEL- Chapters 1-31 - ERBzine

Tarzan on Mars
night which might, indeed, have given hurtling Thuria the
power of speech.
Never before on the dying bosom of Barsoom had such
a confraternity of different races been gathered together in
peaceful co-existence. For here were strange green men and
their females, shorn of their instinctive ferocity, humbled by
their fate, mingling with red man, and with the rare yellow
men of the northern arctic regions of Barsoom. Some there
were who limped or hobbled along, helped by the others,
struggling to grasp at the lingering shreds of life which yet
remained to their deformed and tortured bodies. And there
came with them, too, like some macabre delegation from the
tombs, the sightless and the deaf and dumb—and others sill
whose very minds had been deformed by the unbearable
experience of the River Iss.
These were the Lost People, who moved on the fringes
of the outer world only under the cover of night, for were
their identity known to the "living," they would have been
attacked and driven back into that subterranean hell beneath
the Mountains of Otz from which they had emerged.
Here, indeed, was the most poignant example of the
religious hiatus which now threatened to hurl the entire
planet into universal conflict. It was true that John Carter had
overthrown the old religion and outlawed the cruel deception
of the Therns. But one thing he could not control, and the
other he had not controlled enough.
The decline of any tradition, however false, is followed
inevitably by a straggling remnant of those who stubbornly
persist in the old ways. So it was that long after the River Iss
had been condemned as a passage for pilgrims to the false
heaven of the Valley Dor, thee were those who had clung to
the desperate hope that the world was wrong, and that the
power of faith, alone, would bring them through the dark
unknown to their cherished paradise.
Thus cast upon the bosom of Iss, they were the prison-
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