solution to the mystery. We were above the south polar ice cap. Only at the poles of Mars is there ice or snow upon the planet. No sign of life appeared below us. Evidently we were too far south even for the great fur-bearing animals which the Martians so delight in hunting. 

 Xodar was at my side as I stood looking out over the ship’s rail. 

 “What course?” I asked him. 

 “A little west of south,” he replied. “You will see the Otz Valley directly. We shall skirt it for a few hundred miles.” 

 “The Otz Valley!” I exclaimed; “but, man, is not there where lie the domains of the therns from which I but just escaped?” 

 “Yes,” answered Xodar. “You crossed this ice field last night in the long chase that you led us. The Otz Valley lies in a mighty depression at the south pole. It is sunk thousands of feet below the level of the surrounding country, like a great round bowl. A hundred miles from its northern boundary rise the Otz Mountains which circle the inner Valley of Dor, in the exact centre of which lies the Lost Sea of Korus. On the shore of this sea stands the Golden Temple of Issus in the Land of the First Born. It is there that we are bound.” 

 As I looked I commenced to realize why it was that in all the ages only one had escaped from the Valley Dor. My only wonder was that even the one had been successful. To cross this frozen, wind-swept waste of bleak ice alone and on foot would be impossible. 

 “Only by air boat could the journey be made,” I finished aloud. 

 “It was thus that one did escape the therns in bygone times; but none has ever escaped the First Born,” said Xodar, with a touch of pride in his voice. 

 We had now reached the southernmost extremity of the great ice barrier. It ended abruptly in a sheer wall thousands of feet high at the base of which stretched a level valley, broken here and there by low rolling hills and little clumps of forest, and with tiny rivers formed by the melting of the ice barrier at its base. 

 Once we passed far above what seemed to be a deep canyon-like rift stretching from the ice wall on the north across the valley as far as the eye could reach. “That is the bed of the River Iss,” said Xodar. “It runs far beneath the ice field, and below the level of the Valley Otz, but its canyon is open here.” 

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