All Story Magazine, December 1913 — page 143: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

WARLORD OF MARS. : that I compel Woola to lie flat in the boat, and I, myself, must need bend double before the low roof cleared my head. Immediately the roof rose again upon the other side, but no longer was the way brilliantly lighted. Instead only a feeble glow emanated from small and scattered patches of phos- phorescent rock in wall and roof. Directly before me the river ran into this smaller chamber through three separate arched openings. Thurid and the therns were no- where to be seen—into which of the dark holes had they disappeared? There was no means by which I might know, and so | chose the center open- ing as being as likely to lead me in the right direction as another. Here the way was through utter darkness. The stream was narrow— so narrow that in the blackness | was constantly bumping first one rocky wall and then another as the river wound hither and thither along its flinty bed. Far ahead I presently heard a deep and sullen roar which increased in vol- ume as I advanced, and then broke upon my ears with all the intensity of its mad fury as I swung round a sharp curve into a dimly lighted stretch of water. Directly before me the river thun- ° dered down from above in a mighty waterfall that filled the narrow gorge from side to side, rising far above me several hundred feet — as magnificent a spectacle as I had ever seen. But the roar—the awful, deafening roar of those tumbling waters penned in the rocky, subterranean vault! Wad the fall not entirely blocked my further passage and shown me that I had followed the wrong course I believe that I should have fled any way before the maddening tumult. Vhurid and the therns could not have come this way. By stumbling upon the wrong course I had lost the trail, and they had gained so much ahead of me that now IJ might not be 853 able to find them before it was too late, if, in fact, I could find them at all. It had taken several hours to force my way up to the falls against the strong current, and other hours would be required for the descent, although the pace would be much swifter. With a sigh I turned the prow of my craft down-stream, and with mighty strokes hastened with reckless speed through the dark and tortuous channel until once again I came to the chamber into which flowed the three branches of the river. Two unexplored channels still re- mained from which to choose; nor was there any means by which I could judge which was the more likely to lead ime to the plotters. Never in my life, that I can recall, have I suffered such an agony of in- decision. So much depended upon a correct choice. So much depended upon haste. The hours that I had already lost might seal the fate of the incompara- ble Dejah Thoris were she not already dead—to sacrifice other hours, and maybe days in a fruitless exploration of another blind lead oul unques- tionably prove fatal. Several times I essayed the right- hand entrance only to turn back as though warned by some strange intui- tive sense that this was not the way. At last, convinced by the oft-recurring phenomenon, I cast my all upon the left-hand archway; yet it was with a lingering doubt that I turned a part- ing look at the sullen waters which rolled, dark and forbidding, from be- neath the low archway on the right. And as I looked there came bobbing out upon the current from the Stygian darkness of the interior the shell of one of the great, succulent fruits of the sorapus-tree. I could scarce restrain a shout of elation as this silent, insensate mes- senger floated past me, on toward the Iss and Korus, for it told me that journeying Martians were above me on that very stream. comicloooks.com