=== apom_ch20_pt3 === 

It showed no aperture in the mighty walls other than the tiny door at which I sank exhausted, nor was there any sign of lifeabout it. =

I could find no bell or other method of making my presence known to the inmates of the place, unless a small round role in the wall near the door was for that purpose.  It was of about the bigness of a lead pencil and thinking that it might be in the nature of a speaking tube I put my mouth to it and was about to call into it when a voice issued from it asking me whom I might be, where from, and the nature of my errand. =

I explained that I had escaped from the Warhoons and was dying of starvation and exhaustion. =

You wear the metal of a green warrior and are followed by a calot, yet you are of the figure of a red man.  In color you are neither green nor red.  In the name of the ninth day, what manner of creature are you? =

I am a friend of the red men of Barsoom and I am starving.  In the name of humanity open to us, I replied. =

Presently the door commenced to recede before me until it had sunk into the wall fifty feet, then it stopped and slid easily to the left, exposing a short, narrow corridor of concrete, at the further end of which was another door, similar in every respect to the one I had just passed.  No one was in sight, yet immediately we passed the first door it slid gently into place behind us and receded rapidly to its original position in the front wall of the building.  As the door had slipped aside I had noted its great thickness, fully twenty feet, and as it reached its place once more after closing behind us, great cylinders of steel had dropped from the ceiling behind it and fitted their lower ends into apertures countersunk in the floor. = 

=== end of pt3 ===