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It is said that as we are to the amoeba and the paramecium so are the Priest-Kings to us, that the highest and most lyric flights of our intellect are, when compared to the thought of the Priest-Kings, but the chemical tropisms of the unicellular organism. I thought of such an organism, blindly extending its pseudopodia to encircle a particle of food, an organism complacent in its world—perhaps only an agar plate on the desk of some higher being. I had seen the power of the Priest-Kings at work—in the mountains of New Hampshire years ago when it was so delicately exercised as to affect the needle of a compass, in the Valley of Ko-ro-ba where I had found a city devastated as casually as one might crush a hill of ants. Yes, I knew that the power of the Priest-Kings—rumored even to extend to the control of gravity—could lay waste cities, scatter populations, separate friends, tear lovers from one another's arms, bring hideous death to whomsoever it might choose. As all men of Gor I knew that their power inspired terror throughout a world and that it could not be withstood. The words of the man of Ar, he who had worn the robes of the Initiates, he who had brought me the message of the Priest-Kings on the road to Ko-ro-ba that violent night months before, rang in my ears, "Throw yourself upon your sword, Tarl of Ko-ro-ba!" But I knew then that I would not throw myself upon my sword, and that I would not now. I knew then as I knew now that I would go instead to the Sardar Mountains, that I would enter them and seek the Priest-Kings themselves. - (Outlaw of Gor)