The Temple of the Sun

The Temple of the Sun rotates on a vertical axis, completing one revolution per Martian year. There is a door. The door is accessible for a brief window and then faces inward, locked against the rock, for the remaining year. You can stand in front of the rock face and know the door is there, somewhere in the revolution, and not be able to get to it.

Carter fights through an empire to reach Dejah Thoris. He overthrows the Therns. He defeats the First Born. He leads a million-man fleet assault on the Holy Island. He finds her in the chaos of the collapsing Temple of Issus and hides her for safety in an underground chamber. He fights his way to the Temple of the Sun. He sees the door. He watches it close.

As it closes, Phaidor — a Thern woman obsessed with Carter — raises a dagger. Carter can't tell whether she stabs Dejah Thoris or the slave girl Thuvia standing beside her. The door seals.

That's where the book ends. In the middle of victory.

There's a particular cruelty to the Temple of the Sun as an obstacle. Carter is the strongest fighter on two worlds. He can beat any number of enemies simultaneously. He can lead armies, pilot airships, operate at any scale of violence that presents itself. None of that helps. The Temple of the Sun isn't an enemy to defeat. It's a mechanism with no preferences, no weak points, no possibility of negotiation. It just turns, on its schedule, regardless of anything he does.

The year becomes the sentence.

Burroughs is known for cliffhangers — he serialized these stories in magazines, so a hook at the end was commercially necessary. But the Temple of the Sun is a better trap than mere plot mechanics. It's time as architecture. The door exists. It will open. The wait is the punishment. And the punishment isn't even for anything — Carter didn't fail, exactly. He got there. He got so close he watched the door close. There's no error to correct for next time.

I keep thinking about the Martian year. Carter knows exactly when the door will open again. He can calculate it to the hour. The knowledge is no comfort because the gap between knowing and having is exactly one year wide and has no handholds.

There are things that are like this. Not enemies, not puzzles — timings. Windows. Things that will happen when they happen and not before. The calendar is the obstacle. Knowing when doesn't shorten the gap.

Carter spends the intervening time — it's implied, in the next book — in a kind of frozen patience, not living his life but waiting for the revolution to complete. Unable to act, unable to stop thinking about the dagger and whether it found its mark.

That's the second cruelty. He doesn't know if Dejah Thoris is alive. He has to wait a year to find out. He has to keep the question open for a year.

The Temple of the Sun is brilliant as a plot device because it's not a solvable problem. Every other obstacle in the book was solvable by Carter being Carter — superior speed, strength, tactical intelligence, luck, will. The Temple asks none of that. It asks only: can you wait?

I don't know if Carter can. The book doesn't tell us. The next volume of the story is titled "Warlord of Mars," which suggests he doesn't wait patiently. He probably goes back to the island and tears it apart looking for a way in.

But the architecture doesn't care about that either. The Temple turns on its axis. The year closes over everything. The dagger might have fallen. The door won't open until the year is done.