Edgar Rice Burroughs

A Princess of Mars Edgar Rice Burroughs

I am a very old man; how old I do not know. Possibly I am a hundred, possiblymore; but I cannot tell because I have never aged as other men, nor do I rememberany childhood. So far as I can recollect I have always been a man, a man of aboutthirty. I appear today as I did forty years and more ago, and yet I feel that I cannotgo on living forever; that some day I shall die the real death from which there is noresurrection. I do not know why I should fear death, I who have died twice and amstill alive; but yet I have the same horror of it as you who have never died, and it isbecause of this terror of death, I believe, that I am so convinced of my mortality. And because of this conviction I have determined to write down the story of theinteresting periods of my life and of my death. I cannot explain the phenomena; Ican only set down here in the words of an ordinary soldier of fortune a chronicle ofthe strange events that befell me during the ten years that my dead body layundiscovered in an Arizona cave.