READ THE NOVEL- Chapters 1-31 - ERBzine

Tarzan on Mars
Tarzan's eyes widened almost imperceptibly. This news
was a matter of considerable concern to him because he had
always felt sorry for La and had often searched his conscience
in an attempt to decide what might be a proper solution to her
strange plight. Yet, somehow, an indefinable, almost instinctive
deterrent had always interposed itself when he had
harbored thoughts of exposing La to the refinements of
modern civilization. There were many things in the jungle
and all of nature which the jungle and nature were better
equipped to understand than man, who in precise imitation of
the lower orders which he despised always thought that his
way was the best possible of all alternatives. Perhaps, after
all, La had been born to a particular destiny and purpose of
her own in Opar.
But now this news of her disappearance placed the case
of La, High Priestess of the Flaming God, in a more objective
category.
"Gone?" he said. "Where did she go?—why?"
Akmath shrugged his hairy shoulders. "We do not know.
But we think that the enemy of the Flaming God came down
and stole her away from us."
"Who is the enemy of the Flaming God?"
"Goro, the moon," came the matter-of-fact reply.
Thus confronted with alarming fact confused and tangled
in the web of superstition and ignorance, Tarzan patiently and
determinedly extracted such details as he thought he could
rely upon. And gradually there emerged one single fact which
the Oparians steadfastly upheld in spite of all the possible
reinterpretations Tarzan sought to make of their account.
La had not gone away from Opar. La was not lying somewhere
unconscious, lost or imprisoned in the subterranean
chambers of that ancient ruin—for at last the priests had
forced themselves to search for her, en masse and equipped
with sacred, demon-proof torches. They had found Cadj,
untouched by human hand, yet lying lifeless upon the altar in
21