The morning broke dull and gray.Ominous clouds billowed restlessly and low.Beneath them torn fragments scudded toward the northwest.From her window Tara of Helium looked out upon this unusual scene.Dense clouds seldom overcast the Barsoomian sky.At this hour of the day it was her custom to ride one of those small thoats that are the saddle animals of the red Martians, but the sight of the billowing clouds lured her to a new adventure.Uthia still slept and the girl did not disturb her.Instead, she dressed quietly and went to the hangar upon the roof of the palace directly above her quarters where her own swift flier was housed.She had never driven through the clouds.
It was an adventure that always she had longed to experience.The wind was strong and it was with difficulty that she maneuvered the craft from the hangar without accident, but once away it raced swiftly out above the twin cities.The buffeting winds caught and tossed it, and the girl laughed aloud in sheer joy of the resultant thrills.She handled the little ship like a veteran, though few veterans would have faced the menace of such a storm in so light a craft.Swiftly she rose toward the clouds, racing with the scudding streamers of the storm-swept fragments, and a moment later she was swallowed by the dense masses billowing above.Here was a new 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 demonstrate to them that the daughter of The Warlord was not to be denied! They would learn that Tara of Helium might not be ruled even by the forces of nature!
