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CHAPTER XI - THE CHOICE OF TARA
The dazzling sunlight of Barsoom clothed Manator in an aureole of splendor as
the girl and her captors rode into the city through The Gate of Enemies. Here the
wall was some fifty feet thick, and the sides of the passageway within the gate
were covered with parallel shelves of masonry from bottom to top. Within these
shelves, or long, horizontal niches, stood row upon row of small figures,
appearing like tiny, grotesque statuettes of men, their long, black hair falling
below their feet and sometimes trailing to the shelf beneath. The figures were
scarce a foot in height and but for their diminutive proportions might have been
the mummified bodies of once living men. The girl noticed that as they passed,
the warriors saluted the figures with their spears after the manner of Barsoomian
fighting men in extending a military courtesy, and then they rode on into the
avenue beyond, which ran, wide and stately, through the city toward the east.
On either side were great buildings wondrously wrought. Paintings of great
beauty and antiquity covered many of the walls, their colors softened and blended
by the suns of ages. Upon the pavement the life of the newly-awakened city was
already afoot. Women in brilliant trappings, befeathered warriors, their bodies
daubed with paint; artisans, armed but less gaily caparisoned, took their various
ways upon the duties of the day. A giant zitidar, magnificent in rich harness,
rumbled its broad-wheeled cart along the stone pavement toward The Gate of
Enemies. Life and color and beauty wrought together a picture that filled the eyes
of Tara of Helium with wonder and with admiration, for here was a scene out of
the dead past of dying Mars. Such had been the cities of the founders of her race
before Throxeus, mightiest of oceans, had disappeared from the face of a world.
And from balconies on either side men and women looked down in silence upon
the scene below.
The people in the street looked at the two prisoners, especially at the hideous
Ghek, and called out in question or comment to their guard; but the watchers
upon the balconies spoke not, nor did one so much as turn a head to note their
passing. There were many balconies on each building and not a one that did not
hold its silent party of richly trapped men and women, with here and there a
child or two, but even the children maintained the uniform silence and immobility
of their elders. As they approached the center of the city the girl saw that even the
roofs bore companies of these idle watchers, harnessed and bejeweled as for some
gala-day of laughter and music, but no laughter broke from those silent lips, nor
any music from the strings of the instruments that many of them held in jeweled
fingers.
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