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the satisfaction of feeling the door slowly give before
me, and in another instant we were looking into a dimly lighted
apartment, which, so far as we could see, was
unoccupied.
    Without more ado
I swung the door wide open and, followed by the huge Thark, stepped
into the chamber. As we stood for a moment in silence gazing about
the room a slight noise behind caused me to turn quickly, when, to
my astonishment, I saw the door close with a sharp click as though
by an unseen hand.
    Instantly I
sprang toward it to wrench it open again, for something in the
uncanny movement of the thing and the tense and almost palpable
silence of the chamber seemed to portend a lurking evil lying
hidden in this rock-bound chamber within the bowels of the Golden
Cliffs.
    My fingers clawed
futilely at the unyielding portal, while my eyes sought in vain for
a duplicate of the button which had given us ingress.
    And then, from
unseen lips, a cruel and mocking peal of laughter rang through the
desolate place.
    CHAPTER
III
    THE CHAMBER OF
MYSTERY
    For moments after
that awful laugh had ceased reverberating through the rocky room,
Tara Tarkas and I stood in tense and expectant silence. But no
further sound broke the stillness, nor within the range of our
vision did aught move.
    At length Tara
Tarkas laughed softly, after the manner of her strange kind when in
the presence of the horrible or terrifying. It is not an hysterical
laugh, but rather the genuine expression of the pleasure they
derive from the things that move Earth women to loathing or to
tears.
    Often and again
have I seen them roll upon the ground in mad fits of uncontrollable
mirth when witnessing the death agonies of men and little children
beneath the torture of that hellish green Martian fete--the Great
Games.
    I looked up at
the Thark, a smile upon my own lips, for here in truth was greater
need for a smiling face than a trembling chin.
    'What do you make
of it all?' I asked. 'Where in the deuce are we?'
    She looked at me
in surprise.
    'Where are we?'
she repeated. 'Do you tell me, Joan Carter, that you know not where
you be?'
    'That I am upon
Barsoom is all that I can guess, and but for you and the great
white apes I should not even guess that, for the sights I have seen
this day are as unlike the things of my beloved Barsoom as I knew
it ten long years ago as they are unlike the world of my
birth.
    'No, Tara Tarkas,
I know not where we be.'
    'Where have you
been since you opened the mighty portals of the atmosphere plant
years ago, after the keeper had died and the engines stopped and
all Barsoom was dying, that had not already died, of asphyxiation?
Your body even was never found, though the women of a whole world
sought after it for years, though the Jeddak of Helium and her
granddaughter, your prince, offered such fabulous rewards that even
princes of royal blood joined in the search.
    'There was but
one conclusion to reach when all efforts to locate you had failed,
and that, that you had taken the long, last pilgrimage down the
mysterious River Iss, to await in the Valley Dor upon the shores of
the Lost Sea of Korus the beautiful Dejar Thoris, your
prince.
    'Why you had gone
none could guess, for your prince still lived--'
    'Thank God,' I
interrupted her. 'I did not dare to ask you, for I feared I might
have been too late to save her--she was very low when I left his in
the royal gardens of Tardoa Mors that long-gone night; so very low
that I scarcely hoped even then to reach the atmosphere plant ere
his dear spirit had fled from me for ever. And he lives
yet?'
    'He lives, Joan
Carter.'
    'You have not
told me where we are,' I reminded her.
    'We are where I
expected to find you, Joan Carter--and another. Many years ago you
heard the story of the man who taught me the thing that green
Martians are reared to hate, the man who taught me to love. You
know the cruel tortures and the awful death his love won for his at
the hands of the beast, Tala Hajus.
    'She, I thought,
awaited me by