The Gods of Mars Revoked Read Online Free Page B

reached the shadows of the forest, while right behind
us sprang the swiftest of our pursuers--a giant plant woman with
claws outreaching to fasten her bloodsucking mouths upon
us.
    She was, I should
say, a hundred yards in advance of her closest companion, and so I
called to Tara Tarkas to ascend a great tree that brushed the
cliff's face while I dispatched the fellow, thus giving the less
agile Thark an opportunity to reach the higher branches before the
entire horde should be upon us and every vestige of escape cut
off.
    But I had
reckoned without a just appreciation either of the cunning of my
immediate antagonist or the swiftness with which her fellows were
covering the distance which had separated them from me.
    As I raised my
long-sword to deal the creature its death thrust it halted in its
charge and, as my sword cut harmlessly through the empty air, the
great tail of the thing swept with the power of a grizzly's arm
across the sward and carried me bodily from my feet to the ground.
In an instant the brute was upon me, but ere it could fasten its
hideous mouths into my breast and throat I grasped a writhing
tentacle in either hand.
    The plant woman
was well muscled, heavy, and powerful but my earthly sinews and
greater agility, in conjunction with the deathly strangle hold I
had upon her, would have given me, I think, an eventual victory had
we had time to discuss the merits of our relative prowess
uninterrupted. But as we strained and struggled about the tree into
which Tara Tarkas was clambering with infinite difficulty, I
suddenly caught a glimpse over the shoulder of my antagonist of the
great swarm of pursuers that now were fairly upon me.
    Now, at last, I
saw the nature of the other monsters who had come with the plant
women in response to the weird calling of the woman upon the
cliff's face. They were that most dreaded of Martian
creatures--great white apes of Barsoom.
    My former
experiences upon Mars had familiarized me thoroughly with them and
their methods, and I may say that of all the fearsome and terrible,
weird and grotesque inhabitants of that strange world, it is the
white apes that come nearest to familiarizing me with the sensation
of fear.
    I think that the
cause of this feeling which these apes engender within me is due to
their remarkable resemblance in form to our Earth women, which
gives them a human appearance that is most uncanny when coupled
with their enormous size.
    They stand
fifteen feet in height and walk erect upon their hind feet. Like
the green Martians, they have an intermediary set of arms midway
between their upper and lower limbs. Their eyes are very close set,
but do not protrude as do those of the green women of Mars; their
ears are high set, but more laterally located than are the green
women's, while their snouts and teeth are much like those of our
African gorilla. Upon their heads grows an enormous shock of
bristly hair.
    It was into the
eyes of such as these and the terrible plant women that I gazed
above the shoulder of my foe, and then, in a mighty wave of
snarling, snapping, screaming, purring rage, they swept over
me--and of all the sounds that assailed my ears as I went down
beneath them, to me the most hideous was the horrid purring of the
plant women.
    Instantly a score
of cruel fangs and keen talons were sunk into my flesh; cold,
sucking lips fastened themselves upon my arteries. I struggled to
free myself, and even though weighed down by these immense bodies,
I succeeded in struggling to my feet, where, still grasping my
long-sword, and shortening my grip upon it until I could use it as
a dagger, I wrought such havoc among them that at one time I stood
for an instant free.
    What it has taken
minutes to write occurred in but a few seconds, but during that
time Tara Tarkas had seen my plight and had dropped from the lower
branches, which she had reached with such infinite labour, and as I
flung the last of my immediate antagonists from me the great Thark
leaped to my