Edgar Rice Burroughs - Pellucidar 03 - Tanar of Pellucidar.pdf - Edgar Rice Burroughs - margozap

About The Author

EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS 1875-1950

One of Chicago's most famous sons was Edgar Rice Burroughs. Young Burroughs tried his hand at many

businesses without success, until, at the age of thirty-five, he turned to writing. With the publication of

Tarzan of the Apes and A Princess of Mars, his career was assured. The gratitude of a multitude of

readers who found in his imagination exactly the kind of escape reading they loved assured him of a large

fortune.

Edgar Rice Burroughs died at home in a town bearing the name of his brain child, Tarzana, California.

But, to the countless millions who have enjoyed his works, he will live forever.

ace books

A Division of Charter Communications Inc.

1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

TANAR O F PELLUC IDAR

To JOAN BURROUGHS PIERCE II

COVER PAINTING BY FRANK FRAZETTA

First Ace printing: December, 1962

Second Ace printing: August, 1968

Third Ace printing: November, 1969

Fourth Ace printing: January, 1973

Printed in U.S.A.

A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT TO ALL

ERB ENTHUSIASTS

Because of the widespread, continuing interest in the books of Edgar Rice Burroughs, we are listing

below the names and addresses of various ERB fan club magazines. Additional information may be

obtained from the editors of the magazines themselves.

-THE EDITORS

ERB-DOM

P. O. Box 550

Evergreen, Colorado 89439

THE BURROUGHS BIBLIOPHILES

6657 Locust Street

Kansas City, Missouri 64131

THE JASOOMIAN

P. O. Box 1305

Yuba City, California 95991

THE BURROUGHS NEWSBEAT

7710 Penn Avenue So., #206

Richfield, Minnesota 55423

ERBANIA

8001 Fernview Lane

Tampa, Florida 33615

TANAR OF PELLUCIDAR by

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Pellucidar Series #3

Table of Contents

About The Author

A Special Announcement

PROLOGUE

INTRODUCTION

I STELLARA

II DISASTER

III AMIOCAP

IV LETARI

V THE TANDOR HUNTER

VI THE ISLAND OF LOVE

VII "KORSARS!"

VIII MOW

IX LOVE AND TREACHERY

X PURSUIT

XI GURA

XII "I HATE YOU!"

XIII PRISONERS

XIV TWO SUNS

XV MADNESS

XVI THE DARKNESS BEYOND

XVII DOWN TO THE SEA

CONCLUSION

PROLOGUE

JASON GRIDLEY is a radio bug. Had he not been, this story never would have been written. Jason is

twenty-three and scandalously good looking—too good looking to be a bug of any sort. As a matter of

fact, he does not seem buggish at all—just a normal, sane, young American, who knows a great deal

about many things in addition to radio; aeronautics, for example, and golf, and tennis, and polo.

But this is not Jason's story—he is only an incident—an important incident in my life that made this story

possible, and so, with a few more words of explanation, we shall leave Jason to his tubes and waves and

amplifiers, concerning which he knows everything and I nothing.

Jason is an orphan with an income, and after he graduated from Stanford, he came down and bought a

couple of acres at Tarzana, and that is how and when I met him.

While he was building he made my office his headquarters and was often in my study and afterward I

returned the compliment by visiting him in his new "lab," as he calls it—a quite large room at the rear of

his home, a quiet, restful room in a quiet, restful house of the Spanish-American farm type—or we rode

together in the Santa Monica Mountains in the cool air of early morning.

Jason is experimenting with some new principle of radio concerning which the less I say the better it will

be for my reputation, since I know nothing whatsoever about it and am likely never to.

Perhaps I am too old, perhaps I am too dumb, perhaps I am just not interested—I prefer to ascribe my

abysmal and persistent ignorance of all things pertaining to radio to the last state; that of disinterestedness;

it salves my pride.

I do know this, however, because Jason has told me, that the idea he is playing with suggests an entirely

new and unsuspected—well, let us call it wave.

He says the idea was suggested to him by the vagaries of static and in groping around in search of some

device to eliminate this he discovered in the ether an undercurrent that operated according to no

previously known scientific laws.

At his Tarzana home he has erected a station and a few mile's away, at the back of my ranch, another.

Between these stations we talk to one another through some strange, ethereal medium that seems to pass

through all other waves and all other stations, unsuspected and entirely harmless—so harmless is it that it

has not the slightest effect upon Jason's regular set, standing in the same room and receiving over the

same aerial.

But this, which is not very interesting to any one except Jason, is all by the way of getting to the

beginning of the amazing narrative of the adventures of Tanar of Pellucidar.

Jason and I were sitting in his "lab" one evening discussing, as we often did, innumerable subjects, from

"cabbages to kings," and coming back, as Jason usually did, to the Gridley wave, which is what we have

named it.

Much of the time Jason kept on his ear phones, than which there is no greater discourager of

conversation. But this does not irk me as much as most of the conversations one has to listen to through

life. I like long silences and my own thoughts.

Presently, Jason removed the headpiece. "It is enough to drive a fellow to drink!" he exclaimed.

"What?" I asked.

"I am getting that same stuff again," he said. "I can hear voices, very faintly, but, unmistakably, human

voices. They are speaking a language unknown to man. It is maddening."

"Mars, perhaps," I suggested, "or Venus."

He knitted his brows and then suddenly smiled one of his quick smiles. "Or Pellucidar."

I shrugged.

"Do you know, Admiral," he said (he calls me Admiral because of a yachting cap I wear at the beach),

"that when I was a kid I used to believe every word of those crazy stories of yours about Mars and

Pellucidar. The inner world at the earth's core was as real to me as the High Sierras, the San Joaquin

Valley, or the Golden Gate, and I felt that I knew the twin cities of Helium better than I did Los Angeles.

"I saw nothing improbable at all in that trip of David Innes and old man Perry through the earth's crust to

Pellucidar. Yes, sir, that was all gospel to me when I was a kid."

"And now you are twenty-three and know that it can't be true," I said, with a smile.

"You are trying to tell me it is true, are you?" he demanded, laughing.

"I never have told any one that it is true," I replied; "I let people think what they think, but I reserve the

right to do likewise."

"Why, you know perfectly well that it would be impossible for that iron mole of Perry's to have

penetrated five hundred miles of the earth's crust, you know there is no inner world peopled by strange

reptiles and men of the stone age, you know there is no Emperor of Pellucidar." Jason was becoming

excited, but his sense of humor came to our rescue and he laughed.

"I like to believe that there is a Dian the Beautiful," I said.

"Yes," he agreed, "but I am sorry you killed off Hooja the Sly One. He was a corking villain."

"There are always plenty of villains," I reminded him.

"They help the girls to keep their 'figgers' and their school girl complexions," he said.

"How?" I asked.

"The exercise they get from being pursued."

"You are making fun of me," I reproached him, "but remember, please, that I am but a simple historian.

If damsels flee and villains pursue I must truthfully record the fact."

"Baloney!" he exclaimed in the pure university English of America.

Jason replaced his headpiece and I returned to the perusal of the narrative of an ancient liar, who should

have made a fortune out of the credulity of book readers, but seems not to have. Thus we sat for some

time.

Presently Jason removed his ear phones and turned toward me. "I was getting music," he said; "strange,

weird music, and then suddenly there came loud shouts and it seemed that I could hear blows struck and

there were screams and the sound of shots."

"Perry, you know, was experimenting with gunpowder down there below, in Pellucidar," I reminded

Jason, with ...a grin; but he was inclined to be serious and did not respond in kind.

"You know, of course," he said, "that there really has been a theory of an inner world for many years."

"Yes," I replied, "I have read works expounding and defending such a theory."

"It supposes polar openings leading into the interior of the earth," said Jason.

"And it is substantiated by many seemingly irrefutable scientific facts," I reminded him—"open polar sea,

warmer water farthest north, tropical vegetation floating southward from the polar regions, the northern

lights, the magnetic pole, the persistent stories of the Eskimos that they are descended from a race that

came from a warm country far to the north."

"I'd like to make a try for one of the polar openings," mused Jason as he replaced the ear phones.

Again there was a long silence, broken at last by "a sharp exclamation from Jason. He pushed an extra

headpiece toward me.

"Listen!" he exclaimed.

As I adjusted the ear phones I heard that which we had never before received on the Gridley

wave—code! No wonder that Jason Gridley was excited, since there was no station on earth, other than

his own, attuned to the Gridley wave.

Code! What could it mean? I was torn by conflicting emotions—to tear off the ear phones and discuss

Edgar Rice Burroughs - Pellucidar 03 - Tanar of Pellucidar.pdf

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