Gullivar's Trousers

It's often difficult to know whether Edwin L Arnold's Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation, known more pithily as Gulliver of Mars, is meant satirically, as its even more cumbersomely titled predecessor was.

Then Arnold throws in a passage like this:

     What had they done with her? Surely they had not given her to the ape-men -- cowards though they were they could not have been cowards enough for that. And as I wondered a keen, bright picture of the hapless maid as I saw her last blossomed before my mind's eye, the ambassadors on either side holding her wrists, and she shrinking from them in horror while her poor, white face turned to me for rescue in desperate pleading -- oh! I must find her at all costs; and leaping from bed I snatched up those trousers without which the best of heroes is nothing, and had hardly got into them when there came the patter of light feet without and a Martian, in a hurry for once, with half a dozen others behind him, swept aside the curtains of my doorway.

...which (I hope, at least) rather gives the game away.

The open submissions competition for Iris Wildthyme of Mars is now closed. Many thanks for all your submissions, and a winner will be announced to appearing in the anthology by the end of the month.