“Always have I been taught differently,” replied Ghek; “but since I have known this woman and you, of another race, I have come to believe that there may be other standards fully as high and desirable as those of the kaldanes.  At least I have had a glimpse of the thing you call happiness and I realize that it may be good even though I have no means of expressing it.  I cannot laugh nor smile, and yet within me is a sense of contentment when this woman sings—­a sense that seems to open before me wondrous vistas of beauty and unguessed pleasure that far transcend the cold joys of a perfectly functioning brain.  I would that I had been born of thy race.”

Caught by a gentle current of air the flier was drifting slowly toward the northeast across the valley of Bantoom.  Below them lay the cultivated fields, and one after another they passed over the strange towers of Moak and Nolach and the other kings of the swarms that inhabited this weird and terrible land.  Within each enclosure surrounding the towers grovelled the rykors, repellent, headless things, beautiful yet hideous.

“A lesson, those,” remarked Gahan, indicating the rykors in an enclosure above which they were drifting at the time, “to that fortunately small minority of our race which worships the flesh and makes a god of appetite.  You know them, Tara of Helium; they can tell you exactly what they had at the midday meal two weeks ago, and how the loin of the thoat should be prepared, and what drink should be served with the rump of the zitidar.”

Tara of Helium laughed.  “But not one of them could tell you the name of the man whose painting took the Jeddak’s Award in The Temple of Beauty this year,” she said.  “Like the rykors, their development has not been balanced.”

“Fortunate indeed are those in which there is combined a little good and a little bad, a little knowledge of many things outside their own callings, a capacity for love and a capacity for hate, for such as these can look with tolerance upon all, unbiased by the egotism of him whose head is so heavy on one side that all his brains run to that point.”

As Gahan ceased speaking Ghek made a little noise in his throat as one does who would attract attention.  “You speak as one who has thought much upon many subjects.  Is it, then, possible that you of the red race have pleasure in thought?  Do you know aught of the joys of introspection?  Do reason and logic form any part of your lives?”

“Most assuredly,” replied Gahan, “but not to the extent of occupying all our time—­at least not objectively.  You, Ghek, are an example of the egotism of which I spoke.  Because you and your kind devote your lives to the worship of mind, you believe that no other created beings think.  And possibly we do not in the sense that you do, who think only of yourselves and your great brains.  We think of many things that concern the welfare of a world.  Had it not been for the red men of Barsoom even the kaldanes had perished from the planet, for while you may live without air the things upon which you depend for existence cannot, and there had been no air in sufficient quantities upon Barsoom these many ages had not a red man planned and built the great atmosphere plant which gave new life to a dying world.