drawn by some mighty, irresistible power.

Intense excitement prevailed upon her deck, where men were running
hither and thither, manning the guns and preparing to launch the
small, one-man fliers, a fleet of which is part of the equipment
of every Martian war vessel. Closer and closer to the black shaft
the ship sped. In another instant she must strike, and then I saw
the familiar signal flown that sends the lesser boats in a great
flock from the deck of the mother ship.

Instantly a hundred tiny fliers rose from her deck, like a swarm of
huge dragon flies; but scarcely were they clear of the battleship
than the nose of each turned toward the shaft, and they, too, rushed
on at frightful speed toward the same now seemingly inevitable end
that menaced the larger vessel.

A moment later the collision came. Men were hurled in every
direction from the ship's deck, while she, bent and crumpled, took
the last, long plunge to the scrap-heap at the shaft's base.

With her fell a shower of her own tiny fliers, for each of them
had come in violent collision with the solid shaft.

I noticed that the wrecked fliers scraped down the shaft's side,
and that their fall was not as rapid as might have been expected;
and then suddenly the secret of the shaft burst upon me, and with
it an explanation of the cause that prevented a flier that passed
too far across the ice-barrier ever returning.

The shaft was a mighty magnet, and when once a vessel came within
the radius of its powerful attraction for the aluminum steel that
enters so largely into the construction of all Barsoomian craft,
no power on earth could prevent such an end as we had just witnessed.

I afterward learned that the shaft rests directly over the magnetic
pole of Mars, but whether this adds in any way to its incalculable
power of attraction I do not know. I am a fighting man, not a
scientist.

Here, at last, was an explanation of the long absence of Tardos Mors
and Mors Kajak. These valiant and intrepid warriors had dared the
mysteries and dangers of the frozen north to search for Carthoris,
whose long absence had bowed in grief the head of his beautiful
mother, Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium.

The moment that the last of the fliers came to rest at the base of
the shaft the black-bearded, yellow warriors swarmed over the mass
of wreckage upon which they lay, making prisoners of those who were
uninjured and occasionally despatching with a sword-thrust on