Korad

Korad is an ancient Martian city whose ruins mark the journey to Thark and help measure the scale of the green Martian world around it. Seen among other abandoned settlements, it stands as a reminder that the present inhabitants travel through the remains of older societies.

Place in the Journey

During the twenty-day journey to Thark, John Carter and the party crossed two former sea bottoms and passed through or around ruined cities. Most of those settlements were smaller than Korad, which served as a recognizable benchmark within a landscape of scattered ruins. The journey thus places Korad within a broader pattern: cities once built and inhabited have been left behind, while the green Martians move across the territory.

The route also crossed the cultivated tracts associated with Barsoom’s canals. The travelers approached cautiously, scouting for red Martian troops, then crossed at night along the broad highways that divided the fields. Korad belongs to this account not as a destination but as a landmark in the larger passage between desert, cultivated land, and ruined urban spaces.

The Ruins and the Present

The city’s name survives in the narrative as a measure of the settlements encountered en route, while its former people belong to the distant past. On arrival at Thark, Carter explains that the green Martians have taken their name from the long-forgotten people of that ancient city. The comparison links Korad to the history preserved in place-names even where the original population and civic life have disappeared.

Korad also gives scale to the political geography of the journey. Thark is not a solitary ruin: it is the central city of a territory containing numerous deserted ancient cities, with green Martian communities spread among them. The contrast between abandoned urban structures and the organized, mobile communities of the present makes the ruins a recurring feature of Barsoom’s setting.

Narrative Significance

Korad helps establish that Barsoom’s present is layered over a much older, largely vanished world. Its brief mention among other ruined cities avoids treating the landscape as empty: the ruins record prior habitation, even as Carter’s account offers little detail about their builders or their history. That limited description makes Korad significant chiefly as a point of orientation and comparison, and as one sign of the civilization that preceded the green Martians’ occupation of the region.