Valley of Dor. She is later imprisoned with John Carter's wife Dejah Thoris, in a temple prison which can only be opened once per year and remains by her side for much of the novel and the sequel The Warlord of Mars. Like many of Burroughs Martian heroines, she is tough, courageous, proud and strongly identifies with her aristocratic position in Martian society. Also typically, she is abducted by evildoers (her rescue providing primary motivation for the plot of Thuvia, Maid of Mars) who wish to use her for political gain — in this case by Astok, Prince of Dusar, who blames the kidnapping on Cathoris. Kar Komak: A Lotharian bowman, with a noble and chivalrous personality (unlike the majority of the remaining Lotharians). While initially one of the phantoms projected by the Lotharians to fight off the Green Martian attacks on Lothar, he assumes a corporeal form after Carthoris and Thuvia leave Lothar, and turns out to have been a real Lotharian from the distant past. He joins the pair, fighting in the battles that follow. He is also able to create his own phantom bowmen to assist in combat. Setting Scientific basis Burroughs' vision of Mars was loosely inspired by astronomical speculation of the time, especially that of Percival Lowell, who saw the planet as a formerly Earthlike world now becoming less hospitable to life due to its advanced age, whose inhabitants had built canals to bring water from the polar caps to irrigate the remaining arable land. Lowell was influenced by Italian astronomer, Giovanni Virginio Schiaparelli, who in 1878, had observed features on Mars he called canali (Italian for "channels"). Mistranslation of this into English as "canals" fuelled belief the planet was inhabited. The theory of an inhabited planet with flowing water was disproved by data provided by Russian and American probes such as the two Viking missions which found a dead, frozen world where water could not exist in a fluid state. World of Barsoom A million years before the narrative commences, Mars was a lush world with oceans. As the oceans receded, and the atmosphere grew thin, the planet has devolved into a landscape of partial barbarism; living on an aging planet, with dwindling resources, the inhabitants of Barsoom have become hardened and warlike, fighting one another to survive. Barsoomians distribute scarce water supplies via a worldwide system of canals, controlled by quarreling city-states. The