Helium is a powerful Red Martian kingdom whose fate links the novel’s scientific, political, and personal conflicts. Its canals and atmospheric research belong to a civilization working to preserve life on a declining Barsoom, while its rivalry with Zodanga leaves it vulnerable when its principal fleet is away searching for the captured princess Dejah Thoris. The kingdom’s recovery depends not only on military force but on a new friendship with the Tharks, an alliance made possible by John Carter and affirmed at Helium’s palace.

Kingdom, Science, and Sustenance

Helium is identified as the home of Dejah Thoris, daughter of Mors Kajak, and as the center of a Red Martian society whose scientific work has consequences far beyond its borders. When Dejah Thoris explains the purpose of her expedition to the Thark leaders, she says it had been commissioned by her grandfather, the Jeddak of Helium, to rechart air currents and measure atmospheric density. The party had been on a peaceful research mission, not a military one. She argues that the results of such work serve the Green Martians as well as the Red: without continuing scientific labor to maintain the supply of air and water, she says, Mars could not support a single human life.

Her appeal makes Helium’s scientific role a political argument. Dejah Thoris contrasts the kingdom’s long effort to preserve air and water with the Tharks’ interference, and urges them to abandon hostility and join a broader effort to restore their dying planet. Her speech presents Helium not simply as a rival power but as the holder of expertise that might sustain a shared world. The Thark council listens in silence; the narrator believes the appeal moves them, and sees Tars Tarkas struggle inwardly against inherited custom before he can answer. Helium’s offer of cooperation thus briefly opens a possibility beyond the established division between Red and Green Martians, even though custom and conflict have not yet been overcome.

Dejah Thoris and the Kingdom’s Claim

Dejah Thoris’s identity carries Helium’s political standing into the story’s most consequential negotiations. She names herself as the daughter of Mors Kajak and identifies her expedition as a scientific undertaking sent by her father’s father, the Jeddak. Her appeal to the Tharks also invokes her lineage: she speaks as the granddaughter of one of the Red Jeddaks and asks them to accept the help of her people. Her royal status gives her words public weight, but the force of her case also rests on the material interdependence she describes—air, water, and the shared prospect of a dying planet.

When John Carter, Dejah Thoris, and Sola consider escaping Thark, Dejah Thoris offers Sola a home and protection among the Red Martians of Helium. She promises not merely safety but the love and affection that Sola has been denied under Thark custom. The invitation makes Helium an imagined refuge from a society that treats women and children as communal possessions. Sola, however, warns that escape would be perilous: Helium lies five hundred miles away, much of the route crosses sparsely settled districts, and pursuing Tharks could exact lives at every step. Dejah Thoris then draws a map on a marble floor with a great diamond taken from her hair. Its waterways appear as long straight lines, sometimes parallel and sometimes converging on circular cities; she points out Helium far to the northwest and warns that nearer cities may not be friendly to it. The map turns the kingdom from a promise into a distant, politically complicated destination.

Search, War, and Vulnerability

Helium’s devotion to Dejah Thoris becomes visible through the scale and cost of the search for her. Kantos Kan, a padwar in the Helium navy and a survivor of the expedition defeated by the Tharks, recounts how the damaged remnants of the fleet limped toward home. Near Zodanga, the hereditary enemy of Helium among the Red Martians, Zodangan warships attacked them. Nearly every Helium vessel was destroyed or captured; Kantos Kan’s ship escaped after days of pursuit by three enemy vessels, slipping away during a moonless night.

Thirty days after Dejah Thoris’s capture, Kantos Kan’s ship reached Helium with about ten survivors from an original crew of seven hundred officers and men. Helium immediately sent out seven fleets, each comprising one hundred warships, to search for the princess. Two thousand smaller craft remained continuously in the search, which at first ranged among the northern hordes and later extended south. The effort found no trace of her. Its violence also spread beyond the rescue mission: two Green Martian communities were wiped out by the avenging fleets, showing how the kingdom’s grief and military power could become destructive even when directed toward recovering one person.

Helium’s absence from the main front leaves it exposed to Zodanga. A Zodangan nobleman tells John Carter that the attack on the disabled Helium fleet was an error by Zodanga’s ruler, and that the war is unpopular among his own people because it lacks right or justice. With Helium’s principal fleet occupied in the search for Dejah Thoris, Zodanga’s forces have been able to surround the city and reduce it to a desperate condition. The nobleman reports that she is believed dead after escaping the Tharks and falling into Warhoon hands, a report Carter hears while keeping his own knowledge and feelings guarded. The threat to Helium is therefore bound to the princess’s captivity: the search that expresses the kingdom’s loyalty also creates the opening its enemy exploits.

Alliance and Restoration

The kingdom’s prospects change when Tars Tarkas becomes leader of the Tharks and John Carter proposes rescuing Dejah Thoris from Zodanga and returning her to Helium. Tars Tarkas presents the plan to the council as Carter’s proposal and endorses it. He names both the immediate stakes—Dejah Thoris is held by the Jeddak of Zodanga and expected to marry his son to save her country from devastation—and the advantage the Tharks might gain from alliance. Helium could provide a more dependable source of sustenance, allowing the Green Martians to increase the size and frequency of their hatchings. The Tharks accept for their own reasons: the prospect of combat and the loot of Zodanga make the expedition attractive. The alliance begins not as a sudden conversion but as an agreement in which mutual benefit makes cooperation possible.

After the fighting at Zodanga, Dejah Thoris boards Helium’s flagship. She wants Carter to accompany her, but he refuses to leave Tars Tarkas while the besieging land forces remain to be dealt with. The Helium naval commander promises that Helium’s armies will attack from the city in coordination with the allied land assault. Dejah Thoris is then carried in triumph back to the court of her grandfather, Tardos Mors. The rescue restores the princess to her family, but the surrounding operations also demonstrate that Helium’s recovery requires coordinated action by sea, land, and the newly allied Green Martians.

At the palace, the alliance becomes a public bond between rulers. Tardos Mors meets Tars Tarkas first and says that meeting the greatest warrior on Barsoom is an honor, but receiving a friend and ally is greater still. Tars Tarkas answers that a man from another world taught the Green warriors what friendship meant and made it possible for the Tharks to understand and return Helium’s goodwill. Tardos Mors then greets the Green leaders individually. The welcome does not erase the history of enmity; it gives the former opponents a ceremonial language in which to recognize their change of relation.

Tardos Mors’s welcome to Carter joins the political settlement to the personal rescue. He lays both hands on Carter’s shoulders and welcomes him as a son, saying that Helium’s most precious jewel has been granted to him without opposition. The royal family’s gratitude becomes especially clear when Carter is presented to Mors Kajak, Dejah Thoris’s father. Known for ferocity and fearlessness in battle, Mors Kajak tries repeatedly to express his thanks but is overcome by emotion. In Helium, Dejah Thoris is loved and revered by the whole people as well as by her father; her return is consequently more than a dynastic success. It releases a kingdom from mourning and gives its leaders a basis for accepting an alliance that had once seemed unimaginable.

Political and Narrative Significance

Helium occupies a dual position in the novel: it is both the organized power capable of scientific stewardship and a vulnerable state whose security depends on contested military circumstances. Dejah Thoris’s defense of its work stresses that the air and water systems benefit all inhabitants, while the disastrous attack on its returning fleet and the siege expose the cost of war between rival Red kingdoms. The kingdom’s ideals are therefore tested by its own use of force: the search for its princess leads to the destruction of Green communities even as her speech asks the Green Martians to choose fellowship over inherited hostility.

The eventual Thark–Helium alliance offers a practical, if incomplete, answer to that contradiction. Helium needs allies to withstand Zodanga; the Tharks see the possibility of sustenance and greater hatching; and Carter’s intervention helps these separate interests converge around Dejah Thoris’s rescue. The novel marks the change not only in military cooperation but in the exchange of words and gestures at the palace: Tardos Mors calls Tars Tarkas a friend, Tars Tarkas credits Carter with teaching friendship, and Helium’s ruler welcomes Carter into his family. Helium’s significance lies in this movement from isolated power and mourning toward a relationship that could make the kingdom’s survival and the planet’s future less dependent on enmity.