Dor

“ A-Kor glanced at U-Dor. "Knew you the woman was ill?" he asked.
"Possibly it is lack of food," replied the other. "She mentioned, I believe, that she and her companions had not eaten for several days."
"Brave are the warriors of O-Tar," sneered A-Kor; "lavish their hospitality. U-Dor, whose riches are uncounted, and the brave O-Tar, whose squealing thoats are stabled within marble halls and fed from troughs of gold, can spare no crust to feed a starving girl."
The black haired U-Dor scowled. "Thy tongue will yet pierce thy heart, son of a slave!" he cried. ”

“ O-Tar had slumped down upon his bench—suddenly he looked shrunken and tired and old. "Cursed be the day," he cried, "that saw those three strangers enter the city of Manator. Would that U-Dor had been spared to me. He was strong—my enemies feared him; but he is gone—dead at the hands of that hateful slave, Turan; may the curse of Issus be upon him!"
"My jeddak, what shall we do?" begged E-Thas. "Cursing the slave will not solve your problems." ”

“ Matai Shang rose and, leaning over the edge of the balcony, gave voice to the weird call that I had heard from the lips of the priests upon the tiny balcony upon the face of the Golden Cliffs overlooking the Valley Dor, when, in times past, they called the fearsome white apes and the hideous plant men to the feast of victims floating down the broad bosom of the mysterious Iss toward the silian-infested waters of the Lost Sea of Korus.
"Let loose the death!" he cried, and immediately a dozen doors in the base of the tower swung open, and a dozen grim and terrible banths sprang into the arena. ”

“ They would kill you horribly anywhere upon the surface of Barsoom if that were true; tell me it is not!"
Her eyes were filled with a strange, weird light; her voice was pleading, and her little hands, reached up upon my breast, were pressed against me as though to wring a denial from my very heart.
"I do not know your customs, Dejah Thoris, but in my own Virginia a gentleman does not lie to save himself; I am not of Dor; I have never seen the mysterious Iss; the lost sea of Korus is still lost, so far as I am concerned. Do you believe me?" ”

“ The Black, with cool and terrible efficiency, was forcing him steadily, step by step, into a corner of the square—a position from which there could be no escape. To abandon the square was to lose it to his opponent and win for himself ignoble and immediate death before the jeering populace. Spurred on by the seeming hopelessness of his plight, the Orange Odwar burst into a sudden fury of offense that forced the Black back a half dozen steps, and then the sword of U-Dor's piece leaped in and drew first blood, from the shoulder of his merciless opponent. ”

“ The radium pistol’s weight made his wrist ache, but he clung to it tightly, knowing that he [117] could never cope with a Plant Man with a sword alone. The certainty of coming battle made him smile a little, the way John Carter would smile if he were here in the Valley Dor ready to attack the white Therns and their Plant Men.
For a moment, Kimmy felt a thrill of apprehension. The deepening stillness of the river was closing in around him. Even the music from the phonograph was very, very faint. ”

“ There were things around us and about of which I can render no distinct account—things material and spiritual—heaviness in the atmosphere—a sense of suffocation—anxiety—and, above all, that terrible state of existence which the nervous experience when the senses are keenly living and awake, and meanwhile the powers of thought lie dormant. ”

“ It is only a dirge for the dead.
—How your flesh creeps, as the fearfully solemn tones fall on your ears. How icy cold is the blood in your veins—and yet the beaded drops of perspiration stand upon your temples, and in your palms! How stoutly you struggle to feel that you still have your senses; and yet, in your strong agony, you fiercely bite your lip through and through, and know it not. ”

“ My head is so strangely vision thrilled With plans to evade the demon's stay, But all the plots that my brain have filled Only have served to augment his sway, And on my feet, at the sunset's door, Is spreading a troublesome grievous sore. I'm growing ill I can plainly see, And many prescribe my pain to ease, But somehow each medicine proves to be "A remedy worse than the disease." Though strong as ever, should once my strength Give way, I must fall a fearful length. ”

“ Most dreams are stimulated from the blood into the nerves and the nerve-centers. And the heart is the transmission station. For the blood has a unity and a consciousness of its own. It has a deeper, elemental consciousness of the mechanical or material world. In the blood we have the body of our most elemental consciousness, our almost material consciousness. And during sleep this material consciousness transfers itself into the nerves and to the brain. The transfer in wakefulness results in a feeling of pain or discomfort—as when we have indigestion, which is pure blood-discomfort. ”

“ I will feel the blood in my body like fire, and the strength of a hundred will rush into my limbs, and I will grasp my weapon and slay—slay—till my heart is sick and my head faint; and still there will be the same awful, insatiable thirst that nothing can slake. ”

“ These nerves are the instruments of expression, from the smile upon the infant’s cheek, to the last agony of life. It is when the strong man is subdued by this mysterious influence of soul on body, and when the passions may be truly said to tear the heart, that we have the most afflicting picture of human frailty, and the most unequivocal proof that it is the order of functions we have been considering, that is thus affected. ”

“ The fevered brain might slumber cool,
The eyes forget to weep:
Within that goblet's mystic rim
Are draughts of healing, stored for him
Whose heart is sick, whose sight is dim,
Who prayeth but to sleep! ”

“ In a severe fit of the Night-mare, when the Motion of the Blood, and consequently the Motion of the Heart, is stop’d, the Mind, must be in a terrible agony; and the only chance it has for further communication with the Body, depends upon the vigour and sensibility of the right or superior Ventricle of the Heart; for, if it be not able to push the Blood through the [35] Lungs, and overcome its own weight at the same rime, de Vita Actum est. ”

“ Do I fear, that my heart palpitates? high aspirations cause the flow of my blood; my eyes seem to penetrate the cloudy midnight of time, and to discern within the depths of its darkness, the fruition of all my soul desires. ”

“ The hearing is dull, the sight is deranged, and the external senses impart to the brain only imperfect impressions. The pulsations of the heart are feeble, the pulse is small, the veins are collapsed and the eyelids are livid. The soul is left in a state of languor and sadness and becomes as it were melancholy. ”

“ And spurns the balm which constitutes her sleep;
Her plaintive murmurs float upon the gale,
And almost make the stubborn rocks bewail.
O what is like the awful breach of death,
Whose fatal stroke invades the creature's breath!
It bids the voice of desolation roll,
And strikes the deepest awe within the bravest soul. ”

“ Say that, having a heart, a heart for husband or child, means certain grief,—well, does not riding, walking down your stairs, mean the chance of broken bones? Does not living mean old age, disease, possible blindness or paralysis, and quite inevitable aches? If, as you say, I must needs grow a heart, and if a heart must needs give agony, why, I shall live through heartbreak as through pain in any other limb.
DIEGO
Yes,—were your heart a limb like all the rest,—but 'tis the very centre and fountain of all life.
PRINCESS
You think so? 'Tis, methinks, pushing analogy too far, and metaphor. ”

“ Have any of my readers known what it is to feel the heart stop dead still, after one fierce bound into the throat, the body go cold and clammy, like dank, damp clay—like the earth that I leaned up against in that moment of dumb, stricken terror? ”

“ I felt a deadly sinking in my stomach, while the skin of my back and neck seemed to be wrinkling and to be dragged up as might be a shirt a man is drawing over his head. There is no panic like the panic felt in a dream. ”

“ If we assume that pain exists for the purpose of stimulating muscular reactions, we may well inquire what part of the nervous are is the site of the sensation of pain—the nerve-endings, the trunk, or the brain? ”

“ For there are living apparitions that affect men more deeply than fancied visits from the world of ghosts;—numbing respiration momentarily, making the blood to gather about the heart like a great weight, hushing the voice to a murmur, creating an indescribable oppression in the throat—until nature seeks relief in a strong sigh that fills the lungs with air again and cools for a brief moment the sudden fever of the veins. ”

“ I speculated in my childish way, on the function of each organ of my body and the relation it bore to the great scheme which [Pg 13] we call existence. One day I got to wondering what would happen if my heart should take a notion to stop and rest for a few seconds. The thought of such a catastrophe made me so nervous that all my organs apparently got out of gear and I had a diminutive fit. From that day I began to have all sorts of nervous symptoms, most of which were, to say the least, vague and indefinite. ”

“ For dreams need not time to spin out their intolerable length. With each burning throb of his raging blood, every nerve in his body, every aching recess of his brain, was pierced and twisted, and pierced again with unceasing agony. ”

“ Their clenched teeth still clench'd, and all their limbs
Lock'd up like veins of metal, crampt and screw'd;
Without a motion, save of their big hearts
Heaving in pain, and horribly convuls'd
With sanguine feverous boiling gurge of pulse. ”

“ Now the process of dying, or the spirit's departure from the body, was fully commenced. The brain began to attract the elements of electricity, of magnetism, of motion, of life, and of sensation, into its various and numerous departments. The head became intensely brilliant; and I particularly remarked that just in the same proportion as the extremities of the organism grow dark and cold, the brain appears light and glowing.
Now I saw, in the mellow, spiritual atmosphere which emanated from and encircled her head, the indistinct outlines of the formation of another head. ”

“ As his sleep deepens, the heart slackens its speed, that his rest may be the more sound. He has slept for eight hours, and the time approaches for his awakening. But is the heart weary—that heart which has toiled through the long and sluggard night? ”

“ We are concerned now with the centre of nervous or psychical force below the cavity of the throat, in the chest, in which is felt the sensation of fear; the centre, the disturbance of which sets the heart beating miserably with dread, or which produces that sense of terror through which the heart is said to stand still. ”

“ Thus, a sensation which embraces within its range the whole spiritual being agitates in the same measure the whole framework of the organic body,—heart, veins and blood, muscles and nerves, all, from those mighty nerves that give to the heart its living impulse of motion down to the tiny and unimportant nerves by which hairs are attached to the skin, share equally its influence. Everything tends to a more violent motion. If the sensation be an agreeable one, all these parts will acquire a higher degree of harmonious activity ”

“ Both knees and heart, in crying night and day,
Come, come, my God, O come!
But no hearing.
O that thou shouldst give dust a tongue
To crie to thee,
And then not heare it crying! all day long
My heart was in my knee,
But no hearing. ”

“ When we clasp the hands of one sorely stricken and in the throes of despair, we are, in addition to supplying him with comforting magnetism and physical solace, producing a distinctly analgesic and quieting effect upon his entire nervous system. ”

“ If the dart enter through the midst of the eye, why does my heart suffer pain in my body? Why does not my eye also feel the pain, since it receives the first blow? That can I well explain. The eye has no care to understand aught nor can it do anything in the matter in any way; but the eye is the mirror to the heart, and through this mirror passes the fire by which the heart is kindled; yet so that it neither wounds nor braises it. Then is not the heart placed in the body like the lighted candle which is put inside the lantern? If you take the candle out, never will any light issue thence ”

“ Is not the horizontal posture of the Body, which produces a Plethora in the Vessels of the Brain, and many odd sensations, the most general cause of dreams? Do they ever dream, who sleep in an erect position? Are not the luxurious and the plethoric most subject to disagreeable dreams? Is not the motion and titillation of the Animalculæ in Semine Masculino, the cause of the agreeable dreams which attend nocturnal emissions? ”

“ In a biologic sense pain is closely associated with the emotional stimuli, for both pain and the emotions incite motor activity for the good of the individual. The frequent occurrence of post-operative and post- traumatic pain is accounted for by the fact that the operation or the injury has lowered the threshold of the brain- cells to trauma; the brain and not the local sensitive field is the site of the pain. ”

“ Those voices, neither of men nor women, have a wild, morbid energy which seems to search every fibre of the nervous system, and, instead of soothing or calming, to awaken strange yearning agonies of pain, ghostly unquiet longings, and endless feverish, unrestful cravings. ”

“ But by various species of infirmity and disorder in the body, the nerves, sometimes in their entire system, and sometimes only in those divisions of them which are attached to particular organs of sense, may be subjected to very irregular motions or vibrations. Hence unreal images may be raised in the mind. The state of the nervous affections may be vitiated by intemperate indulgence, or by infirmity resulting from sedentary and melancholy habits. Superstitions, fancies, or enthusiastic emotions, do often greatly disturb the regular action of the nervous system. ”