Thus I was tutored in the arts of war as well as in the arts of peace, for someday when my sire, Jugundus Jad, could no longer sustain his place and departed upon that last, melancholy pilgrimage down the River Iss to that mysterious paradise the priests of Mars believe to lie in the Valley Doron the fabled shores of the Lost Sea of Korus, I must be prepared to take his place at the head of the fighting-men of Zorad, and be ready to defend our homeland against its enemies. In preparation for that day when I would become Jad Tedron, jeddak of Zorad, I was trained virtually from the cradle in the use of longsword and rapier, in the skills of marksmanship with the terrible radium rifles and pistols which have come down to us from earlier aeons and the secret of whose manufacture has long since been lost, at least in those cities which stand yet in the dead seabottoms of the lost sea of Xanthus, and in the use of yet other weapons with whose descriptions I shall not bore him who reads this account.
I became proficient, as well, in the piloting and navigation of the remarkable aircraft employed by the dominant red peoples of Barsoom. These extraordinary vessels (which are known by a word in the universal language spoken across the length and breadth of the Red Planet which translates into English as "fliers") are the most surprising and impressive of the few surviving relics of the lost scientific achievements of the ages which preceded our own. In brief, these vehicles, which vary in size from tiny, two-man scouts to gigantic aerial dreadnaughts as huge as earthly battleships, are propelled through the thinning atmosphere of Mars by powerful radium engines. But the element which renders these skyboаts truly astonishing, especially to a former aviator accustomed to rickety, flimsy aircraft little stronger than paper kites, is that they are entirely fabricated from a light, durable metal unknown to earthly science. It is difficult to imagine any engine powerful enough to lift an airship of solid metal, even one upon a world with as light a gravity as Mars, but in this skill the Martians are assisted by their possession of an advanced scientific discovery yet denied to the savants and inventors of my native world.
This discovery is concerned with the several properties of light. The savants of Mars have, thus far, ascertained that any beam of light, whether emanating from the sun or any other source, is divisible into individual "rays," each of which has different properties. Nine such divisions of light are at this time known to the savants of Mars— in fact, it is due to the remarkable properties of the ninth ray itself that the Martians are able to sustain and replenish their dwindling atmosphere. By utilization of the first ray they power their machines; by use of the second, they heat their homes, while the third ray provides illumination for their cities and the edifices which compose them. The eighth ray provides them with the mysterious ability of levitation, for the airships of Mars are weightless as a cloud, although constructed, as I have already said, of solid metal. For their science is able to produce and store the radiations derived from this eighth solar ray in buoyancy tanks which have the amazing inherent power to reduce the metal fliers to a degree of weightlessness only achieved on my native world by dirigibles and balloons filled with hydrogen or helium gas. A slight variation in their use of the eighth ray of light enables them to use it to propel their fliers through the atmosphere at speeds which would have amazed the aviators of Earth in my time.
The sixth ray is perhaps most incredible of all. By its power their projectors are enabled to dissolve matter into nothingness—a veritable death-ray such as those dreamed of by our earthly fantasists.
And thus it was that my second youth was spent in acquiring a knowledge of the arts and sciences of peace, and in training with the weapons and instruments of war. In both departments of life I achieved a degree of proficiency which was considered highly admirable by my tutors, if I may acknowledge the fact without accusations of vanity by my reader.
Having narrated this cursory account of my birth and youth and schooling, it is not my intention to burden these pages with a more fully detailed description of the education of a Prince of Mars. Suffice it to say that my youth was spent in surroundings of palatial elegance and that I enjoyed every civilized luxury that the condition of royalty affords, and gained considerable competence in the use of weapons and the piloting of skycraft.
I cannot recall a time when I was not fully cognizant of my former life upon the planet Earth. The knowledge of this first life was with me from earliest infancy, and, in my ignorance, I supposed my acquaintance with my former incarnation to be the general rule. Often, as a child, I must have occasioned severe alarm and consternation to my parents and tutors by my innocent and childish prattle of the details of a strange life upon an alien world, which may indeed have given them cause to fear for my mental stability.
Gradually, I learned to keep silent on these matters, for it was borne home to me by a thousand curious questions and puzzled glances that my knowledge of the experiences of a prior life upon a remote and unknown world were unique to the experience of those around me. At length I learned to guard my tongue, and spoke no more of animals who went about on four legs, rather than six or eight as is common with the beasts of Mars, and on fields of unlikely emerald green rather than the scarlet sward of the rare Barsoomian forests or the ochre moss which clothes the dead seabottoms. Doubtless, as I ceased troubling them with unguarded reminiscences of another life, my elders were vastly relieved and anxious to assign these uncanny “memories” of mine to the results of an overactive imagination, rather than to an unsteady grip upon sanity itself.
But never did I allow myself to forget the weird and inexplicable enigma of my former life, and when as a youth I peered through the mighty telescopes employed by the Martian astronomers, and saw again the green fields and blue hills and shining seas of the distant planet whereon I had lived my first life, it was with a sensation of nostalgia which no words of mine are potent enough to describe. And there lived ever in the mind of Jad Tedron, Prince of Zorad, as there lives to this day, the mind and memory of Thad Dexter, the vagabond pilot who had dreamed of traveling widely and of seeing strange, far-off lands and peoples.
Well, those dreams have certainly come true, for unto Thad Dexter it had been given by a mysterious and inscrutable Fate to travel further, by some forty-three million miles, than any adventurer or explorer Earth has ever borne to my knowledge, and to visit stranger lands and peoples than any that Columbus or Marco Polo ever knew.
It was in the spirit of this that I surreptitiously experimented with and trained my innate telepathic abilities, and I believe that I have honed to an acute degree the power to project my thought through space far beyond the point which any other denizen of the Red Planet has ever, or ever will, attain. In the thought that it behooves me to impart some knowledge of my discoveries on the planet Mars for the edification of my fellow Earthlings, I have striven to the very limits of my telepathic talent to transmit to the distant world of my birth this very narrative of my adventures.