John Carter’s return to Earth is the closing reversal of his journey: after ten years on Barsoom, he wakes in Arizona, where the familiar landscape confirms that he has been taken away from the world he loves. Yet the return provides no reunion and no answer. With Dejah Thoris and the fate of Barsoom left beyond his reach, physical homecoming becomes an image of separation rather than restoration.

The Awakening in the Cave

John Carter regains consciousness in darkness, wearing strange, stiff garments that crack and crumble as he sits up. The clothes mark a sudden change in his bodily circumstances: when he had fallen unconscious at a small doorway, he had been naked. Feeling through his pockets, he discovers matches wrapped in oiled paper and strikes one to illuminate the cave. His return begins not with a clear explanation of how he got there, but with the material evidence of a changed condition.

The match reveals a cavern occupied by the mummified remains of a little old woman, hunched over a small charcoal burner and a copper vessel containing greenish powder. Behind her hangs a line of human skeletons, suspended from the roof by rawhide thongs. A further thong connects the skeletons to the dead woman’s hand; when John Carter touches it, the bones swing and rustle. The grotesque arrangement gives the cave the character of a place marked by death, sharply contrasting with the ordinary living world beyond its entrance. John Carter hastens outside, eager to leave the tableau behind.

Recognition of Arizona

On a small ledge outside the cave, John Carter sees a moonlit landscape that at first seems impossible: distant mountains, a nearly motionless moon, and a cactus-covered valley. He recognizes that the scene is not on Mars but in Arizona. The recognition is intensified by the ledge itself. Ten years earlier, he had looked from the same place toward Mars with longing; now he stands there again, returned to Earth from the planet that had become the center of his life.

The return reverses that earlier orientation without fulfilling its emotional promise. Arizona is recognizable, but it is not a consoling destination. John Carter bows his head in sorrow and turns down the trail from the cave. Above him, Mars remains visible as a red point in the sky, but its distance—forty-eight million miles—makes the lost world inaccessible. The return restores a location, not a life: the familiar Earth is now the place from which he must look toward everything he has left behind.

Questions Left on Mars

John Carter’s arrival does not resolve the crisis that preceded his disappearance. He wonders whether the Martian reached the pump room and whether vitalizing air arrived in time to save the people of Mars. The questions keep the ending open at the level of collective survival: the text does not confirm whether the planet’s inhabitants were saved.

His most intimate uncertainty concerns Dejah Thoris. John Carter cannot know whether she is alive or whether her body lies beside the tiny golden incubator in the sunken garden of the inner courtyard of the palace of Tardos Mors. The precise image makes the unanswered question painfully concrete. His return leaves her fate suspended at a particular place on Mars, while he is stranded on Earth with no means, in this passage, to verify what happened.

Ten Years of Separation

John Carter says that he has waited and prayed for ten years for an answer to his questions and to be taken back to the world of his lost love. His longing makes the return an ongoing condition rather than a completed transition: he is on Earth, but emotionally oriented toward Mars and Dejah Thoris. He declares that he would rather lie dead beside her than live on Earth millions of terrible miles away. The possibility of death beside her is presented as preferable to survival in separation, underscoring how little comfort the return itself affords.

Earth does offer material prosperity. The old mine, found untouched, has made John Carter fabulously wealthy. Yet he dismisses wealth as worthless beside the loss that preoccupies him. That contrast prevents the familiar signs of success from turning the episode into a triumphant homecoming: riches cannot answer his questions, bring him back to Mars, or tell him whether Dejah Thoris survived.

The Ending’s Temporal Frame

The episode is narrated retrospectively from John Carter’s study overlooking the Hudson. As he sits there, twenty years have passed since he first opened his eyes on Mars, while the ten-year wait for news and return belongs to the interval after his awakening in Arizona. This later vantage point establishes that he remains on Earth long after the return, still describing himself as separated from his lost love and without an answer to his central questions.

The narrative closes not on a reunion or a confirmed catastrophe, but on the persistence of uncertainty. John Carter’s return completes the movement back to his native planet while withholding the emotional and practical restoration that the word homecoming might promise. Mars remains visible, remembered, and unreachable; Earth is where he lives, but not where his longing rests.