About Edgar Rice Burroughs

John Carter returns to Mars to rescue his queen:

. . . before ever a blade touched me, a roaring embodiment of a thousand demons hurtled above my prostrate form and my loyal Martian calot was upon them.

Imagine, if you can, a huge grizzly with ten legs armed with mighty talons and an enormous froglike mouth splitting his head from ear to ear, exposing three rows of long, white tusks. Then endow this creature of your imagination with the agility and ferocity of a half-starved Bengal tiger and the strength of a span of bulls, and you will have some faint conception of Woola in action.

Before I could call him off he had crushed Lakor into a jelly with a single blow of one mighty paw, and had literally torn the other thern to ribbons; yet when I spoke to him sharply he cowed sheepishly as though he had done a thing to deserve censure and chastisement.

The diadem in the center of the circlet of gold upon the brow of Lakor proclaimed him a Holy Thern. I stood for a moment looking at the gruesome havoc Woola had wrought, and then, a moment later I had torn his yellow wig from the dead man's bald pate and transferred it and the circlet, as well as all his harness, to my own person . . .