Escape from Thark

Escape from Thark is the rescue and escape of Dejah Thoris and Sola after the fugitives’ departure plan is exposed. John Carter’s first attempt to leave the city turns into a return through its shadowed buildings when he discovers that Dejah Thoris has been taken to Tal Hajus. The episode brings the immediate threat to her into direct confrontation with Carter’s loyalty to Tars Tarkas, then sends the three fugitives onto a long, dangerous route toward Helium.

The escape plan and its failure

The plan was to leave Thark that night for a waterway two hundred miles to the north, a route chosen because the distance would make it an unexpected escape path. Sola and Dejah Thoris were to travel together on one thoat; Carter would bring the other. Since the animals could not be pushed too hard across such a distance, the group prepared enough food and drink for two days. Carter sent the women by a less frequented avenue toward the city’s southern boundary while he went to retrieve and saddle the thoats.

The plan depended on keeping both people and animals unnoticed. Carter led the thoats through the city rather than saddling them in the exposed paddock, and walked with them through the shadows to the meeting place. There he found neither woman. After waiting nearly an hour, followed by another half hour of mounting anxiety, he heard a party of mounted warriors pass. Their conversation made clear that the escape plan had been discovered and that the pursuers expected Carter to meet the women just outside the city.

With the thoats still at his side and the city likely alerted, Carter could not simply return by the route he had come. He hid the animals in the inner court of an ancient city building, where moss-like vegetation would sustain them, and climbed to an upper story to approach Dejah Thoris’s quarters. The architecture that first gave him a place to conceal the thoats also offered a way to reach the rooms without passing the warriors below.

The trap at the Jeddak’s quarters

Listening outside the occupied room, Carter heard a chieftain instruct four warriors to seize and disarm him when he returned. The speaker expected their combined strength to be needed, citing reports from Korad, and ordered that Carter be taken to the vaults beneath the Jeddak’s quarters and held until Tal Hajus wanted him. The instructions also revealed that Dejah Thoris would not meet Carter: she had been taken to Tal Hajus, with Sarkoja credited for arranging the capture.

Carter entered the quarters and heard Tal Hajus threaten Dejah Thoris with torture and use her captivity to threaten her family and the people of Helium. The scene shifts the danger from a failed rendezvous to an immediate rescue. Carter intervened before Tal Hajus could carry out his threat, striking him unconscious rather than killing him with the short sword in his hand.

Rescue and flight

Carter led Dejah Thoris and Sola from the chamber without raising an alarm. At a rear window, he used the straps and leather of his equipment to lower Sola and then Dejah Thoris to the ground, following them down himself. They crossed the courtyard, recovered the thoats from the inner court, saddled them, and left by an avenue beyond the building. Sola rode one animal; Dejah Thoris rode behind Carter on the other.

The fugitives did not turn toward the nearest waterway. Instead, they rode south through the hills and then northeast across the mossy waste, toward another main artery leading to Helium. The chosen route meant two hundred dangerous, weary miles, but avoided the nearer path they believed the Tharks would anticipate. Only after they had left the city far behind did Dejah Thoris speak: she acknowledged Helium’s debt to Carter and said that even if they failed to reach safety, he had saved the last of her line from a fate worse than death.

Stakes and significance

The escape turns on a reversal: Carter sets out to lead two companions toward freedom, discovers that the plan has been anticipated, and must return to the city to find them. Concealment, knowledge of the buildings, and the animals he risked bringing into the city become practical means of rescue rather than parts of the original plan. The successful departure does not end the danger; it begins a long crossing with limited provisions and no certainty of reaching Helium.

Carter’s intervention also reflects the relationships shaping the crisis. His decision not to kill Tal Hajus leaves the chance of vengeance to Tars Tarkas, whose hatred of Tal Hajus is tied to the memory of another woman from forty years earlier. At the same time, Dejah Thoris’s final words make the stakes larger than the three riders’ survival: she is the last of her line, and her safe return matters to Helium even if the city never learns what Carter has done.