READ THE NOVEL- Chapters 1-31 - ERBzine

Tarzan on Mars
ers of its insidious currents, and they entered into the charnel
caverns of the dead, or of the mad and depraved, those
cannibal survivors who could neither face the plant men and
the carnivorous white apes on the shores of Korus nor return
to the world of the living.
And here was the sorest point of all. Even though a
universal declaration had been made that the survivors of Iss
might return to their former lives in the outer world, the
rupture of ages-long tradition and the instinctive law of the
race was a thing which should not have been expected of a
mere official decree. In many cases the returning pilgrim was
received with superstitious revulsion, as one might receive a
ghost wearing the scythe scar of the Reaper on his brow, and
soon the unfortunate lost soul was either killed outright or
driven back into the caves of madness and death—for his
claims against the Great Deception were always rejected as
the sacrilege and the blasphemy of a heretic.
So it was that some survivors of this cruel fate had
adapted themselves, however strangely, to an environment
which was limbo—caught between the hate of the living and
the madness of the dead. Of such were the Lost People, eking
out a nomadic existence in the dread, dreary wastes of the
outer valleys of Otz, the orphaned progeny of mismated
philosophies.
Before the arrival of the swift brightening Martian dawn,
they had found Kar Komak sorely wounded and near to death.
They had stanched the ebbing of his blood and carried him off
with them into the wilderness which they alone could claim
as home.
Somewhere in that neverland which lay uncharted and
unwanted between the worlds of the quick and the dead, the
Lost People had built themselves a makeshift town of sorts.
Here was a farming community in one of those rare, lost
valleys where the skulking river of the dead briefly shows its
face to the light of day. And from here this motley colony
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