Warhoon is an ancient ruined city occupied by a large and exceptionally violent Warhoon horde. It becomes the setting for John Carter’s imprisonment and the great games: a place where the remnants of an older city are repurposed into an arena for public killing and where captivity descends into darkness underground.

City and Horde

The Warhoons’ city stands amid the remains of ancient buildings. The horde that inhabits it is smaller than the Thark communities, but Carter judges it considerably more ferocious. Its warriors meet in deadly combat so regularly that he witnesses as many as eight mortal duels in a single day. The city’s ruined fabric is not merely a backdrop: its stones are gathered to contain captives and animals in the arena.

Carter reaches Warhoon after a march of about three days, following an encounter with the horde’s forces. The expedition had been a raid against a small Thark community in retaliation for the destruction of an incubator. After its leader, Dak Kova, is injured, the delay leads the Warhoons to abandon the raid until after the great games. The full force, ten thousand warriors, turns back toward the city.

The Dungeon

On arrival, Carter is immediately thrown into a dungeon and chained heavily to its floor and walls. The cell is so completely dark that he cannot tell whether his confinement lasts days, weeks, or months. Food arrives at intervals, but the jailer gives no answer to his questions, and no sound from the world above reaches him. Crawling creatures move over him in the darkness; at times he sees their gleaming eyes. Carter describes the imprisonment as the most horrible experience of his life, and the isolation brings his mind close to collapse.

His escape from the cell begins with a close observation of the jailer’s routine. The man brings food within reach and stoops, placing his head near Carter’s breast. Carter retreats to the far corner, gathers slack from his chain, and waits in a crouch. When the jailer bends to set down the food, Carter swings the chain into his skull, killing him. The dungeon’s confinement thus ends through the same brutal violence that governs life outside it.

The Great Games

Carter is not the only prisoner in the city. Kantos Kan has independently penetrated Warhoon while searching for Dejah Thoris, spending two days and nights exploring its quarters and dungeons before being captured as he tried to leave. During their shared incarceration, he and Carter form a warm personal friendship. Their confinement ends when they are taken out early one morning for the great games.

The games take place in an enormous amphitheater excavated below ground rather than built above it. Debris has partly filled the structure, obscuring its original size, but it can still hold the twenty thousand Warhoons assembled for the event. The arena itself is immense, uneven, and neglected. Stones taken from the ruined buildings are piled around it as a barrier to keep captives and beasts from escaping into the crowd; cages at either end hold them until their turns to face death. Among those confined are Carter and Kantos Kan, wild calots, thoats, mad zitidars, green warriors, women from other hordes, and unfamiliar beasts of Barsoom. Their roars and cries fill the cages with a din that makes the arena’s threat immediate even before the games begin.

Meaning and Narrative Role

Warhoon concentrates the novel’s contrast between monumental ancient remains and present violence. The amphitheater is both a surviving structure of the old city and an instrument of current cruelty, its ruined masonry pressed into service as a boundary between victims and spectators. The underground dungeon and excavated arena make the city’s architecture part of its system of confinement: Carter is first shut away from the world in darkness, then brought before a vast public assembled to watch captives die.

The city also marks a change in the scale of Carter’s danger. His captivity is no longer only a matter of being held by a hostile force; it exposes him to a society where recurrent duels, dungeon imprisonment, and lethal games are established features of life. Warhoon’s ruined setting therefore joins physical peril to a broader portrait of Warhoon custom, while the friendship with Kantos Kan offers a human bond within the city’s machinery of spectacle and death.