TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y. TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE This Ace edition follows the text of the first hard-cover book edition, originally published in 1929. _Cover art and title page illustration by Frank Frazetta._ PRINTED IN U.S.A. THE KING OF THE JUNGLE IN THE LAND OF THE NOONDAY SUN When word came from the inner world that David Innes, Emperor of Pellucidar, was imprisoned in a Korsar dungeon, Jason Gridley sped to the jungles of Africa to seek aid from the one man capable of besting the terrors of savage Pellucidar. And Tarzan, true to his reputation, organized an expedition, supervised construction of a giant dirigible, and set off at once for the polar entrance to the hidden land. But having arrived, Tarzan realized the worst was yet before them. For almost immediately, Tarzan, Jason, Captain Zuppner and the ten Waziri warriors became separated--each forced to face the terrors of the unknown alone. The thrills of man against prehistoric monster are at fever pitch in TARZAN AT THE EARTH'S CORE. FOREWORD Pellucidar, as every schoolboy knows, is a world within a world, lying, as it does, upon the inner surface of the hollow sphere, which is the Earth. It was discovered by David Innes and Abner Perry upon the occasion when they made the trial trip upon the mechanical prospector invented by Perry, wherewith they hoped to locate new beds of anthracite coal. Owing, however, to their inability to deflect the nose of the prospector, after it had started downward into the Earth's crust, they bored straight through for five hundred miles, and upon the third day, when Perry was already unconscious owing to the consumption of their stock of oxygen, and David was fast losing consciousness, the nose of the prospector broke through the crust of the inner world and the cabin was filled with fresh air. In the years that have intervened, weird adventures have befallen these two explorers. Perry has never returned to the outer crust, and Innes but once--upon that occasion when he made the difficult and dangerous return trip in the prospector for the purpose of bringing back to the empire he had founded in the inner world the means to bestow upon his primitive people of the stone age the civilization of the twentieth century. But what with battles with primitive men and still more primitive beasts and reptiles, the advance of the empire of Pellucidar toward civilization has been small; and in so far as the great area of the inner world is concerned, or the countless millions of its teeming life of another age than ours, David Innes and Abner Perry might never have existed.