Quotation from: The Chessmen of Mars

Written by: Edgar Rice Burroughs


As Tara of Helium looked down into the enclosure surrounding the
nearest tower, her brows contracted momentarily in frowning
surprise, and then her eyes went wide in an expression of
incredulity tinged with horror, for what she saw was a score or
two of human bodies--naked and headless. For a long moment she
watched, breathless; unable to believe the evidence of her own
eyes--that these grewsome things moved and had life! She saw them
crawling about on hands and knees over and across one another,
searching about with their fingers. And she saw some of them at
troughs, for which the others seemed to be searching, and those
at the troughs were taking something from these receptacles and
apparently putting it in a hole where their necks should have
been. They were not far beneath her--she could see them
distinctly and she saw that there were the bodies of both men and
women, and that they were beautifully proportioned, and that
their skin was similar to hers, but of a slightly lighter red. At
first she had thought that she was looking upon a shambles and
that the bodies, but recently decapitated, were moving under the
impulse of muscular reaction; but presently she realized that
this was their normal condition. The horror of them fascinated
her, so that she could scarce take her eyes from them. It was
evident from their groping hands that they were eyeless, and
their sluggish movements suggested a rudimentary nervous system
and a correspondingly minute brain. The girl wondered how they
subsisted for she could not, even by the wildest stretch of
imagination, picture these imperfect creatures as intelligent
tillers of the soil. Yet that the soil of the valley was tilled
was evident and that these things had food was equally so. But
who tilled the soil? Who kept and fed these unhappy things, and
for what purpose? It was an enigma beyond her powers of
deduction.

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Old Dominion University CS Dept
Designed by Joan A. Smith for the CRATE project
Created: 2007-2-22T12:35:29Z
Part of the CratePreservation Project
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Part of a series of experiments in web preservation under the direction of Michael L. Nelson, Ph.D.