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world, a world of chaos unpeopled except for herself; but it was a cold, damp,

lonely world and she found it depressing after the novelty of it had been

dissipated, by an overpowering sense of the magnitude of the forces surging

about her. Suddenly she felt very lonely and very cold and very little. Hurriedly,

therefore, she rose until presently her craft broke through into the glorious

sunlight that transformed the upper surface of the somber element into rolling

masses of burnished silver. Here it was still cold, but without the dampness of

the clouds, and in the eye of the brilliant sun her spirits rose with the mounting

needle of her altimeter. Gazing at the clouds, now far beneath, the girl

experienced the sensation of hanging stationary in mid-heaven; but the whirring

of her propellor, the wind beating upon her, the high figures that rose and fell

beneath the glass of her speedometer, these told her that her speed was terrific. It

was then that she determined to turn back.

The first attempt she made above the clouds, but it was unsuccessful. To her

surprise she discovered that she could not even turn against the high wind,

which rocked and buffeted the frail craft. Then she dropped swiftly to the dark

and wind-swept zone between the hurtling clouds and the gloomy surface of the

shadowed ground. Here she tried again to force the nose of the flier back toward

Helium, but the tempest seized the frail thing and hurled it remorselessly about,

rolling it over and over and tossing it as it were a cork in a cataract. At last the

girl succeeded in righting the flier, perilously close to the ground. Never before

had she been so close to death, yet she was not terrified. Her coolness had saved

her, that and the strength of the deck lashings that held her. Traveling with the

storm she was safe, but where was it bearing her? She pictured the apprehension

of her father and mother when she failed to appear at the morning meal. They

would find her flier missing and they would guess that somewhere in the path of

the storm it lay a wrecked and tangled mass upon her dead body, and then brave

men would go out in search of her, risking their lives; and that lives would be lost

in the search, she knew, for she realized now that never in her life-time had such

a tempest raged upon Barsoom.

She must turn back! She must reach Helium before her mad lust for thrills had

cost the sacrifice of a single courageous life! She determined that greater safety

and likelihood of success lay above the clouds, and once again she rose through

the chilling, wind-tossed vapor. Her speed again was terrific, for the wind seemed

to have increased rather than to have lessened. She sought gradually to check

the swift flight of her craft, but though she finally succeeded in reversing her

motor the wind but carried her on as it would. Then it was that Tara of Helium

lost her temper. Had her world not always bowed in acquiescence to her every

wish? What were these elements that they dared to thwart her? She would

The Chessmen of Mars