also,” he said. “Mine will come soon. I looked upon the radiant beauty of Issus nearly a year since. It has always been a source of keen wonder to me that I did not drop dead at the first sight of that hideous countenance. And her belly! By my first ancestor, but never was there so grotesque a figure in all the universe. That they should call such a one Goddess of Life Eternal, Goddess of Death, Mother of the Nearer Moon, and fifty other equally impossible titles, is quite beyond me.”
“How came you here?” I asked.
“It is very simple. I was flying a one-man air scout far to the south when the brilliant idea occurred to me that I should like to search for the Lost Sea of Korus which tradition places near to the south pole. I must have inherited from my father a wild lust for adventure, as well as a hollow where my bump of reverence should be.
“I had reached the area of eternal ice when my port propeller jammed, and I dropped to the ground to make repairs. Before I knew it the air was black with fliers, and a hundred of these First Born devils were leaping to the ground all about me.
“With drawn swords they made for me, but before I went down beneath them they had tasted of the steel of my father’s sword, and I had given such an account of myself as I know would have pleased my sire had he lived to witness it.”
“Your father is dead?” I asked.
“He died before the shell broke to let me step out into a world that has been very good to me. But for the sorrow that I had never the honour to know my father, I have been very happy. My only sorrow now is that my mother must mourn me as she has for ten long years mourned my father.”
“Who was your father?” I asked.
He was about to reply when the outer door of our prison opened and a burly guard entered and ordered him to his own quarters for the night, locking the door after him as he passed through into the further chamber.
“It is Issus’ wish that you two be confined in the same room,” said the guard when he had returned to our cell. “This cowardly slave of a slave is to serve you well,” he said to me, indicating Xodar with a wave of his hand. “If he does not, you are to beat him into submission. It is Issus’ wish that you heap upon him every indignity and degradation of which you can conceive.”
With these words he left us.
Xodar still sat with his face buried in his hands. I walked to his side and placed my hand upon his shoulder.
“Xodar,” I said, “you have heard the commands of Issus, but you need not fear that I shall attempt to put them into execution. You are a brave man, Xodar. It is your own affair if you wish to be persecuted and humiliated; but were I you I should assert my manhood and defy my enemies.”
“I have been thinking very hard, John Carter,” he said, “of all the new ideas you gave me a few hours since. Little by little I have been piecing together the things that you said which sounded blasphemous to me then with the things that I have seen in my past life and dared not even think about for fear of bringing down upon me the wrath of Issus.
“I believe now that she is a fraud; no more divine than you or I. More I am willing to concede—that the First Born are no holier than the Holy Therns, nor the Holy Therns more holy than the red men.
“The whole fabric of our religion is based on superstitious belief in lies that have been foisted upon us for ages by those directly above us, to whose personal profit and aggrandizement it was to have us continue to believe as they wished us to believe.
“I am ready to cast off the ties that have bound me. I am ready to defy Issus herself; but what will it avail us? Be the First Born gods or mortals, they are a powerful race, and we are as fast in their clutches as though we were already dead. There is no escape.”
“I have escaped from bad plights in the past, my friend,” I replied; “nor while life is in me shall I despair of escaping from the Isle of Shador and the Sea of Omean.”
“But we cannot escape even from the four walls of our prison,” urged Xodar. “Test this flint-like surface,” he cried, smiting the solid rock that confined us. “And look upon this polished surface; none could cling to it to reach the top.”
I smiled.
“That is the least of our troubles, Xodar,” I replied. “I will guarantee to scale the wall and take you with me, if you will help with your knowledge of the customs here to appoint the best time for the attempt, and guide me to the shaft that lets from the dome of this abysmal sea to the light of God’s pure air above.”
“Night time is the best and offers the only slender chance we have, for then men sleep, and only a dozing watch nods in the tops of the battleships. No watch is kept upon the cruisers and smaller craft. The watchers upon the larger vessels see to all about them. It is night now.”
“But,” I exclaimed, “it is not dark! How can it be night, then?”
He smiled.
“You forget,” he said, “that we are far below ground. The light of the sun never penetrates here. There are no moons and no stars reflected in the bosom of Omean. The phosphorescent light you now see pervading this great subterranean vault emanates from the rocks that form its dome; it is always thus upon Omean, just as the billows are always as you see them—rolling, ever rolling over a windless sea.
“At the appointed hour of night upon the world above, the men whose duties hold them here sleep, but the light is ever the same.”
“It will make escape more difficult,” I said, and then I shrugged my shoulders; for what, pray, is the pleasure of doing an easy thing?
“Let us sleep on it to-night,” said Xodar. “A plan may come with our awakening.”
So we threw ourselves upon the hard stone floor of our prison and slept the sleep of tired men.
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