Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 13, 2025
Only the women and children fell prey to the Mahars they being the weakest and most tender and when they had satisfied their appetite for human flesh, some of them devouring two and three of the slaves, there were only a score of full-grown men left, and I thought that for some reason these were to be spared, but such was far from the case, for as the last Mahar crawled to her rock the queen's thipdars darted into the air, circled the temple once and then, hissing like steam engines, swooped down upon the remaining slaves.
Sagoths were on guard here as well as at a hundred or more other towers scattered about over a large plain. Involuntarily I shrank back as one of the creatures approached to inspect us. A more hideous thing it would be impossible to imagine. The all-powerful Mahars of Pellucidar are great reptiles, some six or eight feet in length, with long narrow heads and great round eyes.
"What becomes of those who go below with the learned ones I do not know, nor does any other," he replied; "but those who go to the arena may come out alive and thus regain their liberty, as did the two whom you saw." "They gained their liberty? And how?" "It is the custom of the Mahars to liberate those who remain alive within the arena after the beasts depart or are killed.
Next you will be telling me that you never before heard of the Mahars!" I was loath to do it, and further incur her scorn; but there was no alternative if I were to absorb knowledge, so I made a clean breast of my pitiful ignorance as to the mighty Mahars. She was shocked. But she did her very best to enlighten me, though much that she said was as Greek would have been to her.
"What are they going to do with me?" I asked the fellow at my right. "You are to appear before the learned ones who will question you regarding this strange world from which you say you come." After a moment's silence he turned to me again. "Do you happen to know," he asked, "what the Mahars do to slaves who lie to them?"
I heard a great hissing from the stands occupied by the Mahars, and as I glanced toward them I saw three mighty thipdars the winged dragons that guard the queen, or, as Perry calls them, pterodactyls rise swiftly from their rocks and dart lightning-like, toward the center of the arena. They are huge, powerful reptiles.
"Why, the Lord only knows how long I have been away. I have been to other lands, discovered a new race of humans within Pellucidar, seen the Mahars at their worship in their hidden temple, and barely escaped with my life from them and from a great labyrinthodon that I met afterward, following my long and tedious wanderings across an unknown world.
Why, I am sure that some of the Mahars never sleep, while others may, at long intervals, crawl into the dark recesses beneath their dwellings and curl up in protracted slumber. Perry says that if a Mahar stays awake for three years he will make up all his lost sleep in a long year's snooze.
The Mahars had offered fabulous rewards for the capture of any one of us alive, and at the same time had threatened to inflict the direst punishment upon whomever should harm us. The Sagoths could not understand these seemingly paradoxical instructions, though their purpose was quite evident to me. The Mahars wanted the Great Secret, and they knew that we alone could deliver it to them.
By the time the thipdars had disposed of the last of the slaves the Mahars were all asleep upon their rocks, and a moment later the great pterodactyls swung back to their posts beside the queen, and themselves dropped into slumber. "I thought the Mahars seldom, if ever, slept," I said to Ja. "They do many things in this temple which they do not do elsewhere," he replied.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking