The demise of my father having severed the last remaining link with the town of my birth, I resolved to travel and to see as much of the world as a man of slender means may do. I soon joined Caulfield's Flying Circus, a traveling air show which barnstormed the prairies of the great southwest, first as a mechanic and later as a stunt pilot. For I discovered that I possessed a natural talent for tinkering with machinery and an utter fearlessness of flying, both of which talents go into the making of a born aviator.
But it is not my intention to relate here the fairly exciting but basically routine life of Thad Dexter, daredevil stunt flyer, barnstorming pilot and vagabond aviator. For that life was cut cruelly short before I was thirty, during a stunt flight at a country fair in the fields outside of Baxter, Wyoming, when my parachute failed to open until it was too late to do more than barely break my fall.
That I survived that disaster, even for half an hour, is probably due to the iron strength and tireless endurance I inherited from my hardy pioneer forebears. But I did not survive for long; too many bones were broken and my flesh too terribly mangled for nature or medicine to knit.
My last sight was the worn, tired, kindly face of a country doctor whose name I shall never know, as he bent over me, murmuring quiet words of comfort. That, and a strangely prophetic glimpse through a window in the crude little one-room surgery to which the townsfolk had borne me.
For just as the odor of chloroform filled my lungs and blotted out the consciousness of Thad Dexter forever—as one would have thought— I saw beckoning like a bright beacon through the nighted skies that arched above the dusty plains of Wyoming that distant, ruddy spark that was the Red Planet, Mars, the planet of mystery.
For some reason, that red star caught and held my fading consciousness and I clung to the sight of it, blazing like the eternal enigma it is through the dark skies, until at last my consciousness ebbed and died like a candle blown in the wind.
I died there on the operating table; I know this beyond all doubt or question. But I was reborn to live again in another life on a distant world ... and that is the first of the mysteries in my story which I shall not even attempt to explain, for they have no explanation.
I had been raised in the simple faith of my mother, but my father instilled in me from my earliest years a healthy scepticism of all who pretend to be able to interpret the unknown secrets of life and death and of the world beyond. It was my father's opinion, which I came later to share, that no man can honestly claim to know for certain anything of heaven or the afterlife or the inscrutable will of God, and that all doctrines and dogmas are shallow and ultimately futile attempts to persuade the gullible otherwise.
And if I took my simple childhood faith with a grain or two of salt, you may imagine what little credence I placed in the foreign religions of alien lands. Such outlandish creeds as reincarnation and metempsychosis or the Pythagorean concept of the transmigration of souls I deemed little more than fanciful whimsies born of the fertile imagination of the East.
There was, therefore, no theory by which I could rationalize or explain, even to my own inner satisfaction, the incredible fact of my rebirth upon another planet which followed upon the termination of my earthly existence on that operating table, of which my last living memories are so clear and unequivocal. Do the dead of our world go into their graves upon this earth, to rise reborn upon the dead seabottoms of ancient and mysterious Mars? If so, in all the span of my second life upon the Red Planet, I have never met another man or woman who could recall their previous life on Earth (or Jasoom, as they call it) as can I.
Do I truly live upon this strange world amidst its myriad marvels, which floats in the vast abyss of heaven forty-three million miles from my native world, or is this second life naught more than an indefinitely prolonged and amazingly vivid dream born in the dying brain of an injured aviator, clinging desperately to the feeble and faint and flickering spark of life? Or was my former life on Earth the dream, and this strange life on Barsoom the true and only reality?
I can give you the answers to none of these questions, alas. Nor can any priest or mystic or philosopher, I somehow feel certain.
But following the rude termination of my earthly life, I was born again on distant Mars in the city of Zorad which lies in the northern hemisphere of the Red Planet, on a forested plateau which was once, untold millions of years before, an island in the midst of the Xanthus, the smallest of the five oceans of ancient Mars. These oceans, the greatest of which was the mighty Throxeus in the southern hemisphere of the planet, have long since dwindled away over the inexorable passage of the ages, and at the time of my advent upon this world all of them had vanished, leaving behind only the dead seabottoms carpeted with rust-red sands broken only by those long zones of ochre moss which the Martians cultivate for food and to produce oxygen which serves to continuously replenish their thin atmosphere.
Once long ago over these ruddy plains the pounding billows of mighty oceans drove, but one by one the seas gradually receded, their waters evaporating into the weirdly purple skies of Mars, as the old planet aged and began to die, save perhaps for the legendary Lost Sea of Korus which the Martians suppose to exist in the regions of their South Pole, and which may or may not exist in actuality.
The more civilized of the inhabitants of Mars are human in every aspect, save perhaps in their remarkable longevity and in the mysterious power of telepathy which they possess and which enables them to read the thoughts of others or to project their own mental communications over remarkable distances, or to communicate to some degree even with the minds of the curious beasts with which they share their weird world. As for this matter of longevity, a life-span of more than a thousand years is considered the normal life-expectancy of the average inhabitant of the Red Planet. Their skins are red, their eyes generally lustrous black, and their hair of the same shade. In these respects they resemble the American Indians of my native world, but their features are regular and they are, virtually all of them, a remarkably handsome race.
The city of Zorad in which I began my second life is ancient beyond the dreams of Babylon or Tyre. Here once flourished a magnificent civilization ages before those splendid and imperial cities of earthly antiquity were so much as a cluster of crude mud huts built beside the Tigris or Euphrates by primitive men barely emerged as yet from the red murk of savagery. Indeed, from the evidence of the crumbling and long-deserted quays in the oldest, by now abandoned, quarter of my natal city, where once the stately galleons rode at anchor on the restless waves of the lost seas, when Mars was young and fertile, it may be assumed that Zorad was but newly built at least a million years ago.
Into this city I was born and the name of Jad Tedron was bestowed upon me by my proud parents. My station in life in this second existence is considerably more fortunate than in my first, for I was the only son of Jugundus Jad, the jeddak or king of Zorad, and his presumed and eventual heir.
As the Prince of Zorad and heir to the throne I was raised in surroundings of the most luxurious splendor, my every need or whim satisfied by a host of attendants. My tutors were the most learned and accomplished savants of which Zorad could boast, and they instilled into my young mind all that they retained of the arts and sciences of our ancient civilization, until I became almost as conversant as they in the practice of each skill or subject.
But Barsoom, as I have said, is an ancient and dying world whose resources are dwindling away, year by year, century by century, age by age. Few are the remnants which survive of that splendid and glorious civilization which once, in the planet’s youth, spanned the globe, and those few nations which linger on must struggle ceaselessly against one another for the necessities by which to sustain their survival. Thus it is that Mars, which by an odd coincidence was named on my native world for the God of War, is a world of unceasing warfare, where every nation is at eternal and unending enmity with every other, and each of the cities of the dominant red race into which I was born are constantly at war against the ferocious and indomitable hordes of savage and pitiless green men who roam the dead seabottoms in vast numbers and pose a constant threat to the lingering remnants of the more advanced and civilized red race.