Arizona Cave is the place where John Carter awakens on Earth after ten years on Mars, and its entrance becomes the boundary between his extraordinary life on Barsoom and the home to which he has returned. Its dark interior offers a grotesque first sight; the ledge outside reveals the familiar Arizona landscape and the loss that gives his return its sorrow.

Setting and Interior

The episode identifies the location as Arizona Cave, where John Carter opens his eyes in darkness. He is wearing strange, stiff garments that crack and crumble when he sits up, although he remembers having been naked when he fell unconscious at the cave’s small doorway. A ragged opening shows a patch of moonlit sky, offering a narrow indication of the world beyond.

Searching his unfamiliar clothes, John Carter finds a small parcel of matches wrapped in oiled paper. The match he strikes illuminates a huge cave and a still figure hunched over a tiny bench. The figure is the dead, mummified body of a little old woman with long black hair. Before her stands a small charcoal burner, with a round copper vessel containing a little greenish powder resting upon it.

The cave’s other striking feature is a row of human skeletons suspended across its roof on rawhide thongs. A further thong connects them to the dead woman’s hand. When John Carter touches the cord, the skeletons swing with a sound like dry leaves rustling. The arrangement makes the cave’s first impression grotesque and horrifying, and he hurries outside, glad to leave it behind.

The Ledge and the Return

The cave entrance opens onto a small ledge, and the view from it reverses the expectation raised by John Carter’s awakening. He sees silvered mountains, a nearly stationary moon, and a valley dotted with cacti: not the landscape of Mars, but Arizona. Recognition comes slowly; he realizes that he is looking from the same ledge from which, ten years earlier, he had gazed longingly toward Mars.

That repeated vantage point gives the cave a specific place in the structure of John Carter’s story. It was once a point of departure, associated with longing for another world; now it is the point of return, where the other world has vanished from sight. The landscape is recognizable, but recognition does not restore what he left behind.

Significance of the Homecoming

After recognizing Arizona, John Carter buries his head in his arms and turns down the trail, broken and sorrowful. The cave has brought him back to Earth, but its return is not a joyful resolution: the familiar landscape makes the distance from Mars—and from the life he had there—newly immediate.

Above the cave, Mars shines with its secret forty-eight million miles away. The closing contrast between the ledge on Earth and the distant red planet leaves the cave as the threshold of a painful separation: John Carter is home, yet the world that has defined the preceding decade remains beyond his reach.