READ THE NOVEL- Chapters 1-31 - ERBzine

Tarzan on Mars
Always did the brooding eyes of Va Caraways trouble La
in a way that was undefinable. "Come!" she said. "I will slow
my pace so that we may fall back among the ranks. I would
follow your suggestion and inspect my forces."
"It is well," he muttered.
La ordered her apes to rest, and they lowered her litter
to a save, dry spot high on the shadowed river's banks.
Together, she and Va Caraways watched the warriors pass.
Whenever they saw her seated there in the gorgeous palanquin
between the great torches borne by the richly trapped
white apes, they hailed her as Issus and went on twice
inspired.
For hours the mighty hordes passed by until La began to
realize that fully half a million troops supported her. And
while she watched the spectacle in growing wonderment, Va
Caraways studied her beautiful face— for there, he reasoned,
could be reflected the actual oracle of Basoomian destiny. La,
as a contending Issus, backed by this great symbolic armed
hegira through the caverns of sacred Iss, could well be one of
the major stress points about which the hinges of fate would
swing on the morrow.
The sight which seemed to bother her most of all was
that of the Lost People, whose original forces had been
augmented greatly by a new influx of other members of the
lost legion of the "dead" from the nether regions of the Otz
Mountains. She saw the halt and the blind, the half-deformed
and the gibbering ones who were led forward into battle by
their friends and loved ones, even including children who
bowed to her in reverence and marched on starry-eyed and
trusting toward promised fulfillment. These were the victims
of a false religion which now depended upon such forces as
hers to be reformed.
There were others who came behind them who were not
as taken up with fanaticism as with lust and greed. Offscouring
of the assassin's guilds, pirate kings of swamplands
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